Scathing Online Schoolmarm reads the Mark Dreier letter.

Sentenced to twenty years in prison for theft of hundreds of millions of dollars from investors, Dreier “used money obtained from the scheme to support a lavish lifestyle, including purchasing two beach-front homes in the Hamptons valued at about $12.5 million, a $10.4 million Manhattan apartment, a $18.3 million yacht, a 2007 Aston Martin DB9 Volante, [and] more than $30 million in art work … ‘He abused his clients for seven solid years in every way imaginable,’ said Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Streeter at the hearing.”

But he could write. And he wrote a long letter to the judge before sentencing. Let’s take a look at some of it.

And let’s think about what he wants this letter to do. Clearly, he wants a lighter sentence as a result of sharing with the judge his humanity, his motives, his anguish and guilt.

He says at the beginning, “I am writing to give some context to what I did… to try to explain how a person with my background and advantages came to do the unconscionable. Perhaps in learning how I made these terrible decisions which have ruined my life, others may avoid such mistakes. [This is] a warning to others not to follow in my path.”

Dreier indeed had every advantage, growing up in a loving, affluent home and attending the excellent schools in this post’s title. So one is curious to know how a person to whom so much had been given was able to take so much away.

Although he got the wondrous jobs you’d assume, “I was achieving less satisfaction and recognition than I expected. Colleagues of mine and certainly clients of mine were doing much better financially and seemingly enjoying more status. By my mid-forties I felt crushed by a sense of underachievement.”

Well, he’s honest. And he does write well. He tells us quite clearly that although filthy rich and located at the pinnacle of success in New York City, it wasn’t enough. As long as one other person seemed to have more money or status (That ‘seemingly’ is interesting, isn’t it? It acknowledges the pesky, abstract nature of status. By definition, you can never really know, can you, whether other people are enjoying more?), he was crushed.

Again, you have to admire the honesty. But how sympathetic can you be to someone who honestly tells you that his greed is cosmic, infinite, transtellar, surpassing the imaginings of humankind and deity? Sympathy implies the ability to perceive and feel at least a little of the reality of someone else’s emotions, experiences… What he has done is so extreme, so grotesquely bad, that the idea of his mea culpa serving to stop others from the same behavior doesn’t really get off the ground.

“[I felt] overwhelmed by debt, by a disappointing career, by a failed marriage… And so, incomprehensibly, I started stealing.” But it’s not incomprehensible, even if it is impossible to sympathize with it. If we assume a totally amoral, grasping human being, eaten up inside at the thought of any person with more money or status, the crime is perfectly comprehensible. If your bottomless greed sends you into debt despite your earning an enormous salary; if you don’t care about destroying people; and if you care cosmically about being rich and showing off your goods, then you will certainly steal.

“I lost my perspective and my moral grounding; and really, in a sense, I just lost my mind.” We have no indication of any moral grounding ever in this man’s life – he provides none in the letter – so we cannot go with him here. Bernard Madoff’s parents were both crooks; he understood morality, but never cared for it, and probably didn’t know many people who did. It might be the same situation here. Everything points to an amoral, grasping person from the ground up.

And Dreier certainly never lost his mind. He carried out his crimes with brilliant forethought for seven years, and stopped only when the police hauled him in. There’s nothing crazy about stealing from people if you want their money and don’t care about the law, morality, or the destruction of other human beings. “I just wasn’t in control of myself.” But he was. He may have lost control of his scheme as it became more and more complex. But he himself was always – as was Bernard Madoff – under control. Still is. Writes one hell of a letter.

“In some sense, being caught was a relief.” Now we’re starting to have problems with honesty. Not only that, but as the letter winds down the self-dramatization everyone who knows him describes as part of his spectacular narcissism emerges in a damaging way. His final paragraphs are self-pitying, though meant to be poignant. “I have lost all my friends. I have lost my law license, my law firm, and all that I ever owned. I have seen my family suffer the unimaginable.”  Like ‘incomprehensibly’ earlier, this just doesn’t work. Smart guy like this – he certainly imagined this outcome. He  didn’t care. He doesn’t care about people. He cares about money and status.

This is from the letter’s final paragraph: “I don’t know what gives some men the strength of character to lead virtuous lives for all of their lives, and what causes others, such as myself, to lose their way.”

The rhetoric is bracing but unreal. No one leads an entirely virtuous life; it doesn’t really take that much effort to lead the sort of pretty much moral life most of us manage to lead. It takes effort – unless you’re a career criminal – to spend seven years consciously destroying hundreds of lives.  

SOS suspects that this man did not lose his way, because his way was always degeneracy and covetousness — to get biblical about it. SOS indeed suspects that he took some pleasure at the thought of his evil, of what he was getting away with, of how he was making fools of people.

This letter, well-written as it is, would have been better had Dreier admitted that he is by nature and upbringing a thief, that he rather enjoyed his long run, and that the best he can offer at this point is to say that he’ll maybe spend some time in his cell giving thought to that.