Leo Thomas Crowley was a senior administrator for President Franklin D. Roosevelt as the head of the Foreign Economic Administration. Previously he had served as Alien Property Custodian and as chief of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Late in the 1930s, senior Washington officials discovered that Crowley had embezzled from his banks in Wisconsin in the 1920s and early 1930s. They covered it up. Biographer Stuart Weiss says, Crowley's is:
the darker story of the businessman as speculator and embezzler, whose fraud was covered up in Wisconsin and Washington....[in part it is] the morally complex and compelling story of Crowley as a bureaucrat and politician in Washington, administering multiple major agencies, often simultaneously;...but also deeply involved in conflicts of interest a later generation would find unacceptable and even incomprehensible.