The central question of this article is whether biographies can be a source for criminological research on white-collar crime and how they can contribute to the explanation of white-collar crime. To answer this question, 35 Dutch biographies were studied. Following the legal ambiguities of white-collar crime, not all of these biographies are about criminal offences. And following the dominant anthropomorphic approach to corporate crime, some of these are corporate biographies. Many biographies confirm current criminological explanations of the causation of white-collar crime. Yet, biographies also offer additional insights, for instance about the causal relevance of the private life of white-collar offenders.

The political far right French Vichy-regime or French State (1940-1944) criminalized freemasonry as a dangerous secret society using several state owned measures. In the tradition of the secret Jewish-Masonic conspiracy theory a legal framework was established to criminalize and ban freemasonry, to dissolve the lodges and to remove individual freemasons from command positions. Intellectuals, former freemasons, public and private police and intelligence agencies helped the regime to establish an anti-Masonic documentation, exhibition and movie (Forces occultes) in order to show the French population the danger of freemasonry. A specialized police force (Service des sociétés secrètes) identified 60.000 freemasons, the names of 18.000 were published and 3.000 lost their jobs. 989 were brought to the extermination camps and 545 were shot immediately by private militias.