What do Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried and Al Capone have in common? No, they are not all convicted felons. Capone did serve time for tax evasion, and Holmes was recently sentenced to 11 years in prison for defrauding the public through her blood-testing company Theranos. But Bankman-Fried, founder of the now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, has not yet been charged with anything, although regulators and investigators are sorting through the financial carnage.
The answer to what they have in common is that each one employed a time-honored strategy to win public approval — the “virtue narrative” — even while they were boldly picking pockets.
During the Great Depression, the Tribune reported that a mysterious benefactor opened up a soup kitchen in the Loop and was doling out three free meals every day to more than 2,000 hungry people. A bit of investigative work revealed that the good Samaritan was none other than crime boss Capone, who could easily afford such generosity, given that the annual income from his criminal empire derived from booze, gambling and vice was north of $100 million a year.
