It wasn't long ago when Frank DiPascali was called the "key" to the "global intrigue" of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme.

That was when his lawyer (Marc Mukasey, son of Bush era Department of Terror chief Michael Mukasey) crowed that DiPascali would be a snitch ""of a historic nature, somebody who can pull the curtain back on a fraud and answer a lot of questions" — questions that "the whole world wants to be answered."

You want answers? You want financial crooks brought to justice? Barack Obama's administration isn't doing it, as my colleague James Lieber points out this week. The best steps toward justice so far in both the Madoff scandal and Wall Street's meltdown are being taken by 2nd District federal judges in lower Manhattan. They're talking the talk and walking the walk.

In the murky Bank of America/Merrill Lynch affair, federal judge Jed Rakoff previously blasted both the bankers and Obama's SEC, rejecting their suspiciously kid-gloved settlement and ordering the case to trial. And now, in the Madoff scheme, federal judge Richard Sullivan has rejected a joint request by Obama's Justice Department prosecutors and DiPascali's lawyers to grant bail to the Madoff flunky.

In only his latest rejection of bail for DiPascali, Sullivan declared yesterday that he doesn't trust the government's prosecutors and said he questioned the value of any testimony from him. As the NY Post reported in "Bernie buddy beaned," Sullivan declared that anyone who could be hurt by the Madoff flunky is "in prison in Butner, North Carolina, or at the bottom of a swimming pool someplace."

Nice reference to the death of Madoff pal and fellow profiteer Jeffry Picower. No phony sentimentality about Madoff's pals or blind civility toward prosecutors, just righteous anger from this judge.

Sneering at the arguments by DiPascali's lawyers that Madoff's "chief financial officer" DiPascali was really being helpful and could really unwind the Ponzi scandal's threads, Sullivan also derided the government. More from the Post: