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It’s one thing to cheat the securities markets—the "system"—by cajoling and paying friends for inside information. Getting an edge. It’s done everyday in every walk of life. In school, it might be taking a glance at your neighbor’s test—just a glance—to confirm your multiple choice selections. In sports, it might be taking steroids to make a long fly ball into a three run homer; with a little juice, next year’s salary might just include another zero. Or for the aging former ace pitcher who after losing his best stuff, hides a small dollop of Vaseline in his mitt so that when applied to his finger, the curve ball he had ten years ago once again confounds batters. These things are wrong of course, and they should be punished accordingly. And in the case of Raj Raratanam, the league’s leading insider trader, he has been punished severely: 11 years’ worth of punishment.
But what Nicholas Cosmo did was evil. Pure, unadulterated evil. He preyed on people he knew, people who (for whatever misguided reason) trusted him. And he stole their money. Not their extra money, not money they could afford to lose. No, he stole their life savings. Every penny in some cases. These victims were hardworking people of middle income, who invested their entire life savings into Cosmo’s "company."
At an emotional sentencing hearing, some of those victims spoke out:
“I’m going to be working until they put me in the grave.” – Ellen Gabriel, Hairdresser, lost $130,000.
“There are times when we are lucky to be able to eat one meal a day… We were looking at making money, but we thought we were dealing with a legitimate businessman.” – Paul Priore, lost $25,000, currently on disability from a car accident and caring for a hospitalized father.
These folks and the others like them have not only lost their money, but in some sense their dignity and self-esteem. They will wonder for the rest of their lives why they trusted Cosmo and made such an awful misjudgment. They will live with the knowledge that they were somehow complicit. They could have said no. But that surely does not absolve Cosmo one iota. His evil scheme was the catalyst. He destroyed lives and he is being punished accordingly.