This is the transcript of a podcast episode Ex-FBI special agent Oliver Halle talks about ethics & taking the harder right between GRIP’s US Content Manager Julie DiMauro and Oliver Halle, president of Oliver G. Halle & Associates in Atlanta and a former special agency in the FBI.
[INTRO]
Julie DiMauro: Hello and welcome to a Global Relay Intelligence and Practice, or GRIP, podcast. You can find our daily array of articles, best practice pointers, podcasts and more on our website at grip.globalrelay.com and follow GRIP on LinkedIn.
I’m so pleased to have Oliver Halle with us today to discuss why good and ethical people sometimes take the wrong bend in the road, ethically speaking, and some ideas for business leaders to consider to incentivize ethical conduct.
Oliver, would you please introduce yourself to our listeners?
Oliver Halle: Yeah, I’ll try and keep it brief.
I’ll start with having been a former naval officer with combat experience in Vietnam as an officer in charge of a swift boat, life-shaping experience for me. I am a lawyer by education at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, and I spent 28 years as an FBI agent in three different offices to include New York and Atlanta where I am now.
And after I retired 21 years ago, I put together two businesses, but the relevant one here was my public speaking business. And that was a business where I went around the country with two white-collar convicted felons, both spent time in federal prison for crimes that they had committed.
And one of them who has since died, I knew, he had been an informant of mine, and he had been a fairly prominent guy in local political circles when I was working corruption.
And he was a lawyer, he was chief of staff to the Fulton County Commission Chairman. Fulton County, to let your audience know and make the connection, is the same county where President Trump has been indicted in the Georgia corruption case.
So Josh had been the chief of staff to the Fulton County Commission Chairman, and I met him because a lawyer tried to bribe him with a $300,000 bribe, as well as bribe his boss, the Commission Chairman. We had a trial. Josh testified. The lawyer was convicted, and he was sentenced to three years in prison.
And through that experience, I met Josh, and then jumping and, well, he became an informant of mine and a really, really invaluable source, invaluable. He was so well connected. And then several years later, I was shocked, completely shocked. And that would take a while to tell that story, so leave it up to Julie whether you want me to tell it, but I’m going to jump ahead anyway, and you can have me backtrack if you want.
I was shocked when I found out that Josh had taken a bribe himself. Not one he solicited it, but one he had accepted when it was offered. And he was ultimately found out, and he pled guilty. He cooperated with another FBI agent, and Josh spent a short prison sentence in a federal prison system.
And when he got out, I had already decided that I, it was so shocking to me and so upsetting to me because he was such a good guy, he became a friend, right? The rarest of informants, who actually became a friend. He wasn’t a paid informant, though. That was a very important fact.
And I decided that I wanted to do something that would deter other people, good, honest, moral, ethical people who, you know, if confronted with a difficult moral or ethical situation, typically they’re going to try and do the right thing. But what they don’t know is they can be confronted with a situation that they have no idea, they can’t even imagine, that could completely upend their life if they make the wrong decision.
And something else that is really critical to this is that doing the right thing, making a difficult ethical decision and doing what is right can also completely upend and destroy your life. But our theme, which came from the cadet prayer in part at the US Military Academy at West Point says, “Make me to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong to never be content with a half-truth when the whole truth can be won.”
So I took that first line, “Taking the harder right,” and that became the name of my speaking program and my book. And the book parallels the speaking program. And we went around the country, probably several hundred programs to both federal, state and local government entities, professional conferences, colleges and universities, trying to sensitize people how they could get in trouble in ways they couldn’t possibly imagine.
You know, a lot of people say, you know, I would never make that decision. I would never do anything stupid. I wouldn’t do this. I wouldn’t do that. Well, we were there to sensitize them to – not so fast, you could be caught up in a difficult situation. Julie, I imagine you’ll be asking me about that and we can talk more about it during the course of this program.
Julie DiMauro: This is a fantastic overview. Thank you. I wanted to follow up on that point. Why is it that bad ethical decision making is sometimes a slippery slope? You go from accepting a dinner at a nice restaurant to asking for 25 Super Bowl tickets. How does that happen?
Oliver Halle: Well, I have too many examples to do during this podcast. Way too many. But let me pick one. So imagine this situation. A young man graduates with high honors from a good law school and he gets hired by a silk stocking law firm in a big city USA. We’ll say New York. And he goes to work for this firm and he is happy as he can be. He’s making a lot of money doing challenging work. And he looks forward to Monday to go into the office.
A couple of years go by. A young woman who also graduates with distinction from a good law school. She joins the law firm. And as things happen, they fall in love and they get married. So life is good. Our young couple now have, you know, they have double incomes and making a ton of money.
But you know, another year or two go by and she gets pregnant. They have a child and they make a decision that she is going to stay at home to raise the child. And then they have maybe another one or two children along the way. But his income is more than adequate to pay the mortgage, car payments, whatever they have is more than adequate. He continues to make money, get salary increases, and he’s on a partnership track. Life couldn’t be any better than it is.
Now a few years go by and one day our young lawyer is called into the office of his now new supervisor. And his new supervisor tells him as follows – I’ve reviewed your billable hours for the last few years and you have averaged, you know, about 1,800, which is respectable. We have no problem with that.
But going forward, we expect you to bill 2,300 hours on an average every year. Now 2,300 hours a year is a lot of time. It means you plan your bathroom breaks and you know, you plan everything pretty carefully if you’re going to do it right.
So the young lawyer is somewhat stunned. He’s already working hard. He has family responsibilities that he’s, you know, like all of us, you know, maybe having a difficult time meeting because of work. So our young lawyer tells his boss, OK, I’ll do my best. I’ll, you know, I’ll soldier on.
Well, several things can be going on at the same time. One, what if we have a down economy like the recession of 2008? So you have a down economy and you know, there aren’t many people looking for his legal services. Another problem could be it’s a very competitive market and it’s difficult to attract new clients. So but the lawyer is, you know, he’s going to try and do his best.
Six months go by. His boss calls him in and says, I just want you to know that I’ve reviewed your billable hours for the last six months and I haven’t noticed any real change. And then he tells him as follows. There are a lot of other young lawyers who would love to have your job. And if, you know, you’re not dedicated and committed to this firm like we expect you to be, and if you can’t come up to what we expect of you, maybe it’ll be time to leave.
Now how a young lawyer is terrified. His, you know, his wife is not making any money. They have a mortgage and like I said, they have a good lifestyle. They’re meeting their financial obligations, but without his income, it all unravels and quickly. So he goes back and he is thinking like, oh my God, what am I going to do? I’ve got a…I can’t lose this job. And this is where taking the harder right or the easier wrong comes in.
So let’s say in this instance, he takes the easier wrong. And what do you think that is? What he does is typically what happens to people in this stressful situation. They go to current clients they have and they start billing for hours that they didn’t work. And that’s what he does in this example.
And a sharp accountant in one of these client firms notices these bills and says, this can’t be. There’s no way. And they come to the office, the law office, and they challenge this lawyer. So our young lawyer is called in in a confrontational meeting with his boss and senior partner. And the senior partner says, what’s going on here? I don’t understand. We’ve got these allegations.
And the young lawyer confesses. And he says, look, I didn’t want to do it, but I was desperate to hold on to my job. I couldn’t come up with these extra hours with new clients. I tried my best, but it just wasn’t working with the economy or whatever. And I admit that I did it. I wish I hadn’t, but I did it out of desperation.
Now I always like to joke with the audience at this point and say, how many people here in this audience think that the supervisor who’s sitting there and put this pressure on him is going to say, hey, wait a minute, time out. This isn’t your fault. This is my fault. I put this pressure on you. I’m the one who caused this whole problem.
And I always get a huge outburst of laughter because everybody knows that ain’t going to happen. And instead, what does happen, the supervisor looks at him and he looks at the senior partner. And he says, I’m shocked. I mean, I just don’t get it how he would have done this. Why would you disgrace and embarrass this firm by doing what you did? I mean, we just expected you to work harder and smarter. Not to be a thief. And of course they fire him.
And now what happens? He goes up the street and he starts knocking on doors and he talks to another law firm, but in this instance, it’s not going to be a big silk stocking firm. And he does well in the interview. And then he’s asked this question: “who can we call at your previous firm?”. And we all know that’s the end of that job opportunity at that very moment. And this is how people’s lives can be upended.
I can give examples of cops who start out the most idealistic people in the world, but they end up being managed by bad supervisors and they do things that are corrupt because they think, well, if he’s doing it, it must be OK. Or geez, if I don’t do it, what’s going to happen to me? And we got, again, a million different examples. I got tons of them.
Julie DiMauro: And Oliver, I can see a theme here. I mean, there’s some pressure from supervisors. There is the fear of keeping your job, which is your livelihood, of course, you’re building to pay your mortgage and essentials. And you and I talked about also your employer in America is your conduit, your access to healthcare benefits. And all of this is weighing on you. And again, external pressure. There is the harder right. Can you talk about the harder right?
Oliver Halle: Yeah, the harder right is being able to say, no, I won’t do this. But and people have done that. Obviously, people have. And it has been devastating. You know, the typical example I give in that instance is, you know, you work for a big, say you work for a big manufacturer in a fairly rural area, you know, which is the main employer in that area. And you’re, let’s say you’re an accountant and your boss comes to you one day and he says, you know, the Wall Street expectations for the next quarter are this. And we’ve got to meet those expectations. And the accountant says, well, I hear what you’re saying, but, you know, we’re not doing that well right now.
Our sales are down and we have no reason to project that they’re going to go up unless, you know, something major happens that’s not foreseeable at the moment. And then the accountant, his boss tells him that you need to find a way to make these numbers work. And this, Julie, this happens more frequently than you think.
And now the accountant is back where the young lawyer is. What do I do? And he’s living in a fairly rural area, but he’s, you know, living in high cotton, belongs to the local country club. And if he loses the job, number one, there’s no other job in that area that he’s going to find that’s going to pay him what he’s being paid, none. And that’s not uncommon.
Secondly, who’s going to buy his house? He’s in a market where he’s at the upper, the top end of the housing market in this rural area. And who’s going to be moving in that wants his house? So he now not only can’t find the job in the area, he can’t sell his house to move maybe to, you know, a city. So the pressure is on him now. What do I do? And if he fudges the numbers, he’s committing a felony and it could be he could end up going to prison.
But if he plays it straight and says, look, I can’t do this, I just can’t. And he doesn’t play the game and he’s fired, taking the harder right. Well, as I said, he’s done. Taking the harder right can be the most difficult thing you’ve ever done. But at least this conscience is clear. He’s not going to prison. He’s not going to be charged with a crime. But at the same time, you see what I’m saying in the private sector, these things happen and they’re devastating. And most people don’t see it happening to them or that it could, it could even happen to them.
Julie DiMauro: Absolutely. Now, I want to get to in a minute, you know, what businesses can do to better incentivize ethical behavior and what might not be working for them that they’ve been seeing as a solution that you and I talked about training in particular. But before we go there, can you tell us about I believe her name is Diane?
Oliver Halle: Yeah, Diane. She was one of my associates with Josh. We traveled the country. What she did was a little different. She worked for a family-owned HR business and they loved her. She’s a very charismatic woman and she’s very likeable, very outgoing. And they made the mistake that a lot of businesses mistake and they gave her complete control of paying and receiving. And I’ve learned, I’m not an accountant, but I’ve learned that you don’t do that.
No matter how much you trust somebody, you don’t do that. You have two different people to do those two functions. But they loved her. She’d been there a number of years. She did a great job and how she ended up embezzling about a half million dollars from the firm. And again, it was a family-owned business. So that was a ton of money to the business.
And how it began, though, is what’s interesting. She was married at the time, had three young kids and she’s from she was from Utah and they were going out to ski over the Christmas holidays. So she bought plane tickets and some other stuff on her American Express credit card and realized when the bill came in that she had mistakenly put it on the corporate American Express card, not hers.
So she said, oh, boy, OK, well, I’ll just pay it back. You know, right now it’s a little tough. It’s after Christmas. I’ll pay it back next month. So next month comes and goes and it’s like, well, you know, still a little tight. I’ll get it next month. Well, now it’s you know, we’re talking about March. And by then she began to rationalize. Well, you know, yeah, I owe this money.
But on the other hand, when the business owners were out of town, they’d have me coming over to their house to walk their dog and do all these other things. And you know, I never got paid for that. And when we were out on the ski slopes over Christmas, you know, I got calls and emails, you know, related to work and I did it and I never got paid for that.
So you know, and she began to rationalize that, you know, hey, you know, I’m owed this money. So, you know, the heck with it, I’m not going to pay it back. And then on top of all of that, as she got used to this, she began to take regularly. That was the beginning. She began to take regularly.
And what brought this house of cards down was I forget, er, two or three years went by and she was at home one day and this thing was eating at her. And she was she had the TV on in the background. It was Oprah Winfrey with then Dr. Phil. And listening to this show, there was some woman on there who had some she had done something and Diane didn’t remember what. But whatever it was, you know, Dr. Phil said, well, you know, you can’t live with that. You just can’t live with that. And it resonated with Diane and she’s thinking, oh, my God, I just, you know, this is killing me.
So the next day she went into her boss and she said, I have to talk to you. And she was crying and the boss is looking at her like, well, this must be serious. And she told him I’ve been stealing from you. And he was shocked, shocked. I’ve been stealing from you. And his first question was, how much? She said, I don’t know. I just don’t know. I just been doing it for a few years. And so they fired her right away, changed the locks, did a forensic audit.
They figured out at least a half million dollars. Could have been more. Who knows? But anyway, it destroyed her life. I mean, she’s working now. She’s she over the…I got her two jobs after all of this. I met her through a newspaper story. The Atlanta Constitution did a newspaper story on Josh and me. And through that story, Diane was in a halfway house. And she had already finished the hard part of her federal prison, but she had to do time and a halfway house. And she saw the newspaper story and skipping the details. She ultimately found me, reached out to me. And I had only been retired at that point about six months. And I told her, frankly, I’m not interested in your story.
The newspaper story said that when Josh gets out of prison, he’ll have a job waiting for him. I told her what happened to him. He’ll have a job waiting for him, working with Halle in this corporate scared straight, taking a harder right program. And so Diane said, whoa, that’s something I’d like to do. We hadn’t even done our first program yet. It was all a concept. But anyway, so she reached out to me and I really wasn’t interested in bringing her in because I was looking more for the type of crime that like Josh did, you know, good person makes makes a bad mistake or the examples I gave.
Hers to me was more of a garden variety fraud. But I met with her when she got out of the halfway house and I said, well, tell me about yourself. I just listened. I figured I’d listen, be polite, get rid of her. She tells her story very well in our speaking program. And the more I listened, the more I was impressed. I mean, when she told me about her background, religious background, Mormon background, you know, her life story. And the more I listened, the more I was like, wow, this is pretty powerful. This could resonate with a lot of people. And that’s how how it began with her and me. She still struggles.
I want to make this very, very clear to your audience, Julie. Very clear. White collar criminals, unless it’s serious, a guy like Bankman Fried, Sam Bankman Fried, he got 25 years. They’re the exception. Most of them, you know, three, five, seven years. OK, they come out of prison. And as I have always told our audience, they may get a short prison sentence. I could probably do their prison sentence myself standing on my head. I really think I can. I know myself well enough. The hard part is the day you walk out because that’s the first day of the life sentence that you begin to serve.
You are barred from any job that requires a license. Think about how many jobs require a license. Teaching, professional services, even in most states, including mine, Georgia, you need a license to cut hair. And if you’re a convicted felon, you can’t get one. So your life sentence begins that first day out, trying to find a job and get back on track.
And Diane is a good example without somebody that can speak up for you, it ain’t going to happen and you’re not going to work for a big corporation. They’re not going to hire you. Give you a short example. In Diane’s case, you know, I have a coffee group we’ve been meeting for 21 years. So we used to meet at this Panera and we got to know the HR person. She used to come over and talk with us.
So one day she said, hey, you guys were all professionals or retired. Do you know anybody who might be interested in coming to work here and, you know, on a career path into management? So I said, actually, I do. I got a woman and I told her about Diane. I said, she’d be great. She’s educated.
You know, well, anyway, Dorothy said to me, I’ll never forget it. She said to me, I’m sorry, we can’t hire her. Our insurance carrier would never cover her. They wouldn’t cover her. They wouldn’t take a chance. And I remember, you know, I had told Diane I’m going to try and help you with this. Nope. So even something like that, it’s a part of your life sentence.
Julie DiMauro: Oliver, I want to ask you about two of the methods employers traditionally rely upon to deter ethical misbehavior, which is surveillance and training. Can you tell us about your thoughts on both of those and maybe where you think, you know, employers do the right thing when it comes to surveillance and training and maybe where they fall down?
Oliver Halle: Yeah. If people, in my opinion, if a person is motivated to refrain from committing a crime, say, out of fear of punishment, but in their heart, that’s the only thing holding them back or on the other side, if they are doing good things only because of the hope of reward, but they’re doing it for that reason, not because they want to, but figuring, you know, maybe I’m scoring points. In my opinion, these are fundamentally bad people. They may not hurt you, but their heart….they’re bad people.
If people don’t do the right thing, ethically and morally, because you know what? That’s the right thing to do. You just do it because it’s the right thing to do. Then they’re fundamentally, in my opinion, they’re not good people.
I had, you know, was going to firearms training this particular morning and I always read the papers early and I’m reading this story in the Atlanta Constitution. It was not a big story, but about two cops, they picked up a vagrant and one of the cops decided to help himself to money that this vagrant had on his person. He had like $7,000 on him and this one cop took a lot of the money and put it in his own pocket. So apparently the other cop turned him in. The story wasn’t that big, but anyway, the chief of police confronted the bad cop. He confessed and he was fired. That’s the gist of the story.
OK. So I go to firearms. We’re taking a break and this guy named Tommy, he worked for a local police department and he ran the range. They owned the range, this police department, we used it. So Tommy’s talking about this newspaper story to a bunch of people standing around. And I’m listening with one ear because I was already familiar with it. And Tommy says, Tommy says as follows to these people. Yeah, I’ve trained a lot of rookies in my career and I always tell these rookies, you keep your hands off other people’s possessions. If it’s not yours, you don’t touch it. Keep your hands off it. You never take anything that’s not yours.
I’m thinking, OK, that’s pretty banal advice. If he had stopped there, life would have been great, but he didn’t. And this is what he said next. I tell these rookies, you never know where there’s a hidden camera or microphone. And if you, you know, take the chance of taking something, you know, you could be recorded and that could be the end of your career. And I’m thinking, Oh my God, this guy I’ve known him for years and I never knew that side of him. And if that’s what’s keeping him from being a thief himself, this is a bad guy.
Julie DiMauro: So to an extent, surveillance works, right? It incentivizes good behavior because of your fear, but it has limitations because what about those situations when you know the surveillance is not happening when you’re outside of it or outside of the penumbra of it. And then at that point, you know, maybe if you think the surveillance is not happening or you’re well outside of it, or you’ve found a loophole, then you’re going to maybe engage in the bad act. It’s not a perfect solution surveillance, but it’s a start.
Oliver Halle: I, you couldn’t have said it better. Yeah, I agree. Couldn’t have said it better.
Now on the training part, if you recall that after Enron collapsed, the Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. And one of the requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was that certain sized companies had to have and certify mandatory ethics training every year. And, you know, we at the FBI, we went through that too. And that was computers. It was much easier.
So you would do it, you know, on the intranet at the FBI. You do the ethics training. I talked to a lot of people who did the same thing in the companies, when Sarbanes-Oxley was passed and we were doing our program and it’s laughable. It’s an academic type program. You know, the typical training is academic.
Well, you know, what if this situation and it’s a bunch of what ifs and hypotheticals that most people will never relate to. So they sit there, they listen, they take their, you know, one hour, whatever ethics test online, and as soon as they hit the submit button, they have forgotten everything. There’s no reason to remember. It’s all academic and you know, why would you remember it? Now, when I did my program, I would always in my introduction say the difference between what you’re going to get the next two to three hours, depending on what we contract for, the difference is this.
This is not an academic program. This is a reality based program. And every person in this room, when you leave here are going to feel a connection to it and they didn’t know what they were in for. They did not know because we sprang surprises on the audience. That was part of our shtick.
And in Josh’s case, the way we sprang this sprung the surprise is I would talk about him in my presentation, which went first. And I would talk about how this guy who was an FBI informant that codenamed Romeo Mike, Ro Mike for short. And I would talk about Ro Mike. And I would talk about what happened to him, how he, his life was completely destroyed, how he was suicidal. I talk about all of that. Never mentioning his name, I got done with my presentation and then I would say, I’m going to introduce our next speaker and I had, I take a one sentence introduction, it went like this.
Our next speaker is Josh Kenyon. And he is going to talk to you about ethics from his vantage point of having worked in the government sector. He would get up and it was great. Julie, you could hear the gasps in the audience. He would get up there and he was kind of nerdy and he played on that. He played on it. He would get up there and this is typically what he would say. Thanks, Oliver. I appreciate it.
You know, for those of you out there, Oliver and I, we’ve been friends now for, you know, the last 15 years, whatever. And to this day, he still calls me Romeo Mike. And you could hear the gasps in the audience. Oh my God. That’s the guy he was talking about. And now I have the audience, have them completely.
And then when Diane, when it came time for her to speak, I would get up. After Josh sat down I’d get up and say, our next speaker is Diane Katani. She’s going to talk to you about ethics from the vantage point of the private sector. And she would get up and for the first, oh, the first 10, 15 minutes, she would talk about growing up in Utah and a religious family, going to Brigham Young, getting married, having children, having this great job, being on these different volunteer things, going to the White House for different dinners associated with different things.
And she would go on and then, and then this is where the, the surprise came in. She would say, and I have lived in Atlanta now, you know, for like the last 15 years with the exception – pause – of 18 months – pause – that I lived in Mariana, Florida – pause – in federal prison. Ooh, she owned the audience at that point.
So it was reality based. People like, oh my God, these people, Josh and Diane, they look like me. They look like us. So they related to them. It was real. And I wish, I wish I could know and I won’t, but kind of like teachers, you know, that once in a while a teacher has the good fortune, you know, 30, 40 years go by and a student who has done exceptionally well comes back to that teacher and says, you know what? You’re the one who made the difference. You’re the one who motivated me when I wasn’t motivated. Oh, I was struggling at home. And you’re the one who kept me going. And I want to thank you. I wouldn’t be here today, but for you, that happens to some teachers. And to me, that’s got to be one of the most gratifying moments in their life.
We never got that in our program, but what we did get occasionally, I, you know, somebody from the audience. I remember one guy in particular in Michigan came up to me and he said, you know, I just want you to know that your program pulled me back. He said, I can’t tell you what was, has been going on, but it’s pulled me back from what I was doing and going forward. Everything’s going to be different.
Julie DiMauro: Amazing. And it’s because of what you’re saying. These courses, they weren’t really, you know, courses, but in some regards, they were educational training and, and they were immersive, engaging, relatable. Right? And had a very human element to them.
Oliver Halle: You had two operative words, relatable and human element. That’s, that’s it. You know, when people can say, identify with somebody and that’s part of interviewing techniques too, when you’re trying, you know, you’re interviewing people, you’re trying to get a confession, you know, you sit there and you try and relate to that person and to get them to relate to you.
So they’ll talk to you and tell you things that they don’t want to tell you. And in this instance, you know, the audience is, is relating. And you don’t know how many are sitting out there actually doing things, feeling or doing whatever.
Julie DiMauro: Oliver, it’s been a wonderful and fascinating discussion. Thank you so much for sharing your time with us today. I’m just going to conclude by saying thank you to all of our listeners as well. If you’re hearing this, you probably know about us, but please tell your friends. Global Relay Intelligence and Practice at grip.globalrelay.com. And you can follow us on LinkedIn. Until our next podcast or until you read our next article, I bid you all farewell and thank you once again, Oliver.
Oliver Halle: You’re welcome. I enjoyed it. Appreciate it.
