Banksters or ballplayers

While the people who brought you the Economic Apocalypse of 2008 still run free, I'm glad the SEC has decided to go after the real offenders.

Mr. Murray, who was among the 10 highest paid players in the National League in 1991, when he signed a two-year deal with the New York Mets for $7.5 million, made about $235,000 in illegal gains by buying shares of Advanced Medical Optics ahead of the deal and then selling his stake after it was announced, the S.E.C. said. Mr. Murray agreed to settle the case by paying $358,000 in disgorged profits and penalties without admitting or denying the charges.

“It is truly disappointing when role models, particularly those who have achieved so much in their professional careers, give in to the temptation of easy money,” said Daniel M. Hawke, a senior S.E.C. enforcement lawyer.

Michael J. Proctor, a lawyer for Mr. Murray, said that his client “is an honorable and ethical man who is settling this to put the matter to rest and move on with life.”

The charges against Mr. Murray come a day after federal regulators charged another sports figure, the former University of Georgia football coach Jim Donnan, with running a Ponzi scheme that defrauded fellow coaches and his former players.

The latest cases add to the spate of lawsuits brought by the commission against athletes. Last December, the former Chicago Bears receiver Willie Gault was accused of artificially inflating the stock of a company he helped run. He has denied the claim.

Eddie Murray, Hall of Famer and, in the view of the SEC, a destroyer of capitalism.

"More than insubstantial"

The Ponzi scheme unwinds.

“I am gravely concerned by the apparent multiple failures over at least a decade to thoroughly investigate these allegations or at any point to seek formal authority to pursue them,” Mr. Cox said.

Moreover, Mr. Cox said, the commission will investigate “all staff contact and relationships with the Madoff family and firm, and their impact, if any, on decisions by staff regarding the firm.” Mr. Cox added that he had ordered S.E.C. staff to recuse themselves from the investigation if they had “more than insubstantial personal contacts with Mr. Madoff or his family.”

One of the commission’s investigative teams that had examined the Madoff firm was headed by a lawyer named Eric Swanson, who served for 10 years as a lawyer at the commission and left in 2006 while he was an assistant director of the office of compliance inspections and examinations in Washington.

In 2007, Mr. Swanson married Shana Madoff, a niece of Bernard L. Madoff and daughter of his brother, Peter Madoff, the firm’s chief compliance officer. Ms. Madoff is the firm’s compliance attorney.

That sounds more than insubstantial.

I feel certain, Dear Reader, that like me, you await with all the anticipation of a child at Christmas, to see how many more Ponzi schemes are about to collapse.