Faced with proof that then Columbia prexy David Begelman forged checks, what did the company do? Throw him out on his ear? No, the board pressured top exec Alan Hirschfeld to keep the repentant former agent on staff, arguing that he was a good leader, and besides, the amount of money he stole wasn’t really that much.

Never mind the fact that Columbia, then as now, was a publicly traded company and the news was sure to leak out eventually.

“Indecent Exposure,” David McClintick’s absorbing chronicle of the late 1970s check kiting scandal, unfolds like a slow train wreck.  Reading it today, the parallels between the board’s arrogance and the banking industry’s recent behavior is hard to miss. 

The same type of moral relativism that financiers like Herb Allen employed informs today’s arguments that those AIG execs really deserve those retention bonuses despite having helped bring down the global economy. At the time of the Begelman scandal there was much tut-tutting over Hollywood’s laissez faire attitude toward such ethical breaches — supposedly Judy Garland waved off talk that Begelman had embezzled her while her agent — but the East Coast moneymen on Columbia’s board at the time seem to be just as tone deaf as producer Ray Stark, a tireless advocate for his pal Begelman.

Quite simply, they acted as if the normal rules did not apply to them. And this, McClintick reminds more than once, was but a few years after the Watergate scandal brought down the similarly arrogant Nixon administration. “All the President’s Men” had hit theaters the year before.   

Remarkable.