Pretty much, what they did wasn't like illegal to do for the MOST part (trying to buy up the world's silver supply), but if I remember right what DID land them in trouble was lying to lenders about how leveraged they were so they could go around to different banks and lenders and get basically the same leverage without telling any of them they ALSO had near identical loans with dozens of other lenders.

So that's why they got away without jail time, but it basically bankrupted all of them with the fines, debts they incurred, etc.

But yeah that was my main point, that today's silver market is MUCH different and the "hard crash" of the 80s was artificially engineered and in no way natural, but rather the result of greedy incompetence of literally 3 or 4 people (I can't remember if there were three or four brothers involved). INFINITELY harder to do that today with all the regulations in place, as well as the supply being diversified over millions of holders AND institutional players permanently taking it off the market for good for manufacturing usage and strategic reserves.