Humorous fallout from the New Jersey corruption scandal involving politicians, rabbis, body parts, public works and contractors: Former Bergen County Democratic Chairman Joseph Ferriero, convicted about a week ago on federal corruption charges, gets to vote Tuesday because he hasn't yet been sentenced.

As a good Democrat, he would probably vote for Jon Corzine in the gubernatorial race, because Corzine's foe, Chris Christie, was the U.S. attorney who prosecuted Ferriero. But neither Corzine nor Christie is much of a bargain, so what's a crook to do?

Matt Friedman explains at PolitickerNJ.com that New Jersey law allows felons to vote until the time of their sentencing. Ferriero isn't the only pol on this list. So if Republican Christie were to lose the gubernatorial race against incumbent Democrat Corzine by only a few votes, the goniffs would have the last laugh.

Jeffry Picower, accused of raking in billions from pal Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme, was found dead in the bottom of his Palm Beach swimming pool today.

The 67-year-old goniff and philanthropist got more than $2.4 billion from the fraud in just the past six years, according to court documents. Far from being a victim, authorities say, Picower "earned" up to 950 percent a year — not a bad return on Madoff's zero investments. (See the May 12 complaint.)

When he wasn't doing buyout deals, Picower did a lot of good with some of the gelt, through his foundation, which now is supposedly broke. It wasn't immediately known whether Picower's death was an accident, suicide, murder, or just bad karma. He was said to have been suffering from Parkinson's and other maladies.

Perp walk for Raj Rajaratnam

How could anybody be breathless about the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's Office measly $20 million bust of hedge-funder Raj Rajaratnam and cohorts for allegedly illegal inside trading?

Yet the Wall Street Journal's follow story this morning on Friday's bust of the pirates associated with Rajaratnam's aptly named Galleon treats this as if it were a real indication that Wall Street's goniffs are being tracked down.

If this is the crux, the main point, of the Galleon case — read the U.S. attorney's press release and complaints — it's not that big a deal.

New York Attorney General Andy Cuomo is the prosecutor who's doing the hard work of hounding the culprits of last fall's crash. U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, Barack Obama's guy in the crucial Southern District prosecutor's office, wants us to salute him for the Galleon case?

Bloomberg News notes that this is an indication that prosecutors will use wiretaps in unraveling future Street crime. Yeah, that's comforting.

And the NYT insists that prosecutors "intended [the] case as a shot across the bow of hedge funds." What total bullshit that is. Yeah, I'll bet hedge fund moguls like John Paulson are really shaking in their boots that people made $20 million from this alleged wrongdoing and got caught.

The WSJ story notes Galleon "pushed its traders so hard to get market-moving information that those who failed were frequently berated or pushed out."

You don't say! WTF, this unpleasant behavior is SOP on the Street and in thousands of other businesses.

This morning's NYT story notes that the wiretaps leading to the charges against the Sri Lankan dude were full of "a fair number of four-letter swear words." Fucking unusual, eh?

I like how Bharara says "this case should serve as a wake-up call for Wall Street." Not likely. This may be a big insider-trading case (but it's not really, based on what we know so far), but it's nothing compared with last fall's meltdown — and it has nothing to do with last fall's meltdown. We're still waiting for some federal government action on that.

One item of political interest: Indian-born Preet Bharara's first highly publicized bust is of a Sri Lankan who supposedly contributed money to the Tamil rebels, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. They're the dudes who assassinated Indian pol Rajiv Gandhi.

This case against Rajaratnam by an Obama appointee should help the Democrats among the steadily more influential Indian-American population, especially because of Rajaratnam's supposed support of the Tamil terrorists.

Good for a snicker is the NYT story last August about Bharara, particularly the headline: "For Manhattan's Next U.S. Attorney, Politics and Prosecution Don't Mix." Yeah, right. Except that Bharara was chief counsel for Demo kingpin senator Chuck Schumer.

Pakistan's stock market took the planet's worst financial nose dive today. Its biggest fuel explorer plunged into a barren green hole, and its biggest bank, MCB, plunged 5 percent after being ignominiously being downgraded by Bank of America's Merrill Lynch unit.

Very bad news in the world's seventh most populous country.

For historical value and general amusement/horror, click on the video above for the Karachi Stock Exchange's recent puff piece about what a wonderful opportunity Pakistan is for investors. The truth is that Pakistan's meltdown endangers every other South Asian economy.

Poor Pakistan. Talk about a bubble that's past the bursting point. Schools and colleges have been shut down for a week, and troops are hunting militants thought to be hiding in seminaries in the federal capital, Islamabad, as Dawn reports.

Maybe Michael Jackson's will really did run out, but the estate documents he left behind may live forever.

Curious about MJ's will and the fight over his estate? Don't stop till you get enough info from Death and Taxes - The Blog ), where Chicago-area estates lawyer Joel Schoenmeyer breaks it down.

While you're at it, click on the above video for MJ and James Brown sharing a stage.

Too glib for his own words in peddling his Ponzi scheme, Bernie Madoff today will end his propositions with a sentence.

Not as nefarious a figure as thrill killer Richard Loeb, about whose death that wordplay was coined in 1936 by Chicago newsman Ed Lahey, Madoff didn't kill anybody (unless his victims' suicides count), but he nevertheless perpetrated a lot of grief for a lot more people than Loeb did.

He's expected to get a life sentence, whether it's 13 years, 30, or 50. (His lawyer has promised that Madoff will be dead no later than 2022.) That number will be determined this morning by a federal judge. But other numbers are still hazy.

When Madoff's scheme broke into the news pages, he was said to have ripped off $50 billion. Court-appointed trustee Irving Picard eventually estimated the net losses suffered by investors at $13.2 billion. So far, Picard says (according to this morning's WSJ), only $1.2 billion has been recovered. But the hunt for the missing gelt goes on.

Ruth Madoff's figures, on the other hand, are fairly well set. She's giving up $80 million in assets but, as the WSJ pointed out, gets to keep "just $2.5 million" in cash. It's as if she won the lottery. As former Portfolio contributing editor Gary Weiss (author of Wall Street Versus America) writes:

Al Sharpton, the great healer, has naturally tried to interject himself into the state Senate mess that has paralyzed any legislative attempt to work on New York's economic crisis.

But the guy who was able to get James Brown to appear with him can't even get Governor David Paterson to a palaver.

Sharpton called a "summit" on the Senate mess. So far, no success.

Every state is hurting, but only New York has Al Sharpton. But Sharpton's lost his touch. Back in 1974, when he was only 19 and America's cities were either burning or smoldering, Sharpton horned in on one of James Brown's appearances on Soul Train. In the video above, host Don Cornelius introduces Sharpton, who presents the Godfather of Soul with a gold record and touts himself as a young black leader. (It was a gold record that Brown already had received, obviously, but it was repackaged so Sharpton could present it and thus garner some publicity. Which he did.)

In the current crisis in Albany, Sharpton has so far garnered just a modicum of publicity. How did the "summit" turn out? It didn't amount to much of anything. Sharpton did meet Saturday with erstwhile rebel senator Hiram Monserrate and others. They posed for pictures, said a few words, and then retired for a private meeting. Invited guest David Paterson was apparently a no-show.

At least he didn't hack anyone to death, as dead-mama's boy Tony Perkins did in Psycho. See the latest Post piece on this scam, "OWN BRO GOT HOOD-WIGGED: 'NORMAN BATES' SCAMMER'S MAMA ACT."

The competition's stiff, because inevitably a new president will wind up appointing a number of stiffs to important jobs. But here are four losers who currently lead the list of President Barack Obama's worst hires:

Larry Summers: Head of Obama's National Economic Council, Summers was a key figure during the Clinton Era in the dismantling of the Glass-Steagall Act. A stalwart friend of big banks, the former Harvard prexy is said to be very smart. So are a lot of schnooks.

Steve Rattner: Head of Obama's auto task force, the investment banker gets this appraisal from a fresh Wall Street Journal story: "No one has played a more central or contentious role in the auto bailout." Rattner's also an investor in Cerberus, the hedge fund that used to operate Chrysler. Not much of a conflict of interest there. Rattner's also the founder of Quadrangle, one of the hedge funds caught up in the pension-fund scandal.

Tim Roemer: Obama's new ambassador to India is a raving anti-environmentalist cloaked as a "moderate Democrat." He's a "distinguished scholar" at the Mercatus Center, the most hardline and notorious anti-environmentalist and anti-regulation agitprop mill in D.C. Mercatus was the Bush White House's chief engineer in rolling back health, safety, and other regulations — kind of the Anti-EPA, if you will.

Tim Geithner: The Treasury Secretary was head of the New York Fed during last year's meltdown and somewhat astoundingly was hired by Obama. No Republican president could have appointed a Treasury secretary friendlier to Wall Street's investment bankers than Geithner. Check out Geithner's inner circle and you have to wonder how he wound up in Obama's.