The reliance on e-mails as definitive, incriminating evidence of chicanery was once a given, but that didn't last long. Social media have now damaged the credibility of such e-mails, as the monumental Bear Stearns fraud verdict shows.

E-mails shooting back and forth during 2007 between Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin looked like bullets that hit the target, damning the two hedge-fund goniffs on charges of securities fraud. (See my previous item for details from the indictment.)

Such careless and stupid e-mails revealing crooked behavior doomed previous goniffs, like Jack Abramoff and his henchmen in the infamous Wampumgate corruption scandal of the Bush era. (The unmasking of that scandal was one of John McCain's finest moments, if you recall.) The e-mails wove a fascinating web of corruption extended to the religious right, several congressmen, and Karl Rove. And the e-mails not only brought Abramoff and crew to justice, but they forced congressmen out of their jobs.

But this is a new time, and texting and twittering have now convinced many people that e-mails are also thoughts on the fly that aren't necessarily proof or even strong evidence. That's obviously because we all now rue some of the thoughts on the fly that we text and twitter. And texting and twittering are even more careless and less thought-out than e-mails.

So cases built on e-mails no longer have the cred they once had.

But the problem is this: Those thoughts on the fly are often really good evidence of malicious or illegal intent. Twittering and texting have merely inured the common folk, blinding them to that fact. Just because someone twitters, texts, or e-mails incriminating statements doesn't make those statements not incriminating.

In any case, John Hueston, who prosecuted Enron's top crooks, Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, says it best in this morning's New York Times:

The verdict in the Bear Stearns fraud case has far-reaching implications for Wall Street execs, and it's all good — for them.

Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin were found not guilty in Brooklyn federal court of fraud and other charges related to their blatant lying about their hedge funds, which were built on the subprime-mortgage house of cards.

In the only federal prosecution so far of any of the goniffs who helped cause last year's Wall Street meltdown, they got away with murder (of their investors' money), if you read the last year's indictment. Even their participation in the homicide of Bear Stearns (their funds lost almost $2 billion) was blessed by the jury, which said the prosecutors didn't give them enough evidence.

According to the indictment, back on March 2, 2007, Cioffi and Tannin were freaked out by their funds' extremely shaky — even doomed — liquidity because the subprime mortgages underlying the CDOs they were peddling were collapsing. They drank "a vodka toast" privately just for surviving the previous month without having to fold their huge hedge funds, and they kept their worries to themselves, not even telling their bosses, apparently. To investors, however, they lied, saying everything was hunky-dory (lie) and that they were putting their own money into their funds (lie).

The next day, March 3, according to the indictment, Cioffi told Tannin that things could be worse: "[W]e have our health and families ... [w]e are not a 19-year-old Marine in Iraq. ..."

Barack Obama's administration has so far been witless for the prosecution of the goniff investment bankers who crashed Wall Street and has shown no signs of clawing back the wealth that dramatically shifted from households to private equity, hedge funds, foreign bank accounts, and the bailed-out banks themselves.

Read about Obama's clawless — not clueless but inherently clawless — crew in James Lieber's "We've Bailed out the Banks. When Do We Go After the Crooks Behind our Financial Collapse?," the Voice's cover story this week. Long piece, but a quick read.

You might remember Lieber's "What Cooked the World's Economy?" from earlier this year, in which he laid out a groundbreaking, readable analysis of the devilish details.

Obama hasn't exactly surrounded himself with regulators, as Lieber points out.

An argument could be made that the Bush administration's prosecutors were more aggressive against the Wall Street goniffs last year than the current crew. No shit.

The view from Bernie Madoff's ex-house in the Hamptons.

From Molly Bernhart at Fierce Finance, this slideshow: "House party: The most infamous properties of 2009." Not just Bernie Madoff's abodes, but also the Wells Fargo Party House and others.

Bank of America to Pay for Merrill Backstop, Faces SEC Trial (Bloomberg)

Ken Lewis trying hard to buy his way out of trouble, saying BofA will pay $425 million to cancel one piece of unused federal guarantee of Merrill Lynch's assets. Lewis frantically trying to reduce "reliance on government support and return to normal market funding." Will it help fend off the government? SEC says it will "vigorously pursue" its bonuses case against the bank, and maybe the SEC means business now that federal judge Jed Rakoff is on the agency's back.

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Liquidation of CDOs aids banks (FT)

Market has loosened up for the assets underlying the complex, toxic securities that crashed Wall Street. An estimated $123 billion of these bullshit, defaulted securities that fed the Street's excessive greed have been liquidated.

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Is This a Sucker's Rally? (Seeking Alpha, Jeff Miller)

A good roundup of bloviations good and bad.

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Why haven't any Wall Street tycoons been sent to the slammer? (McClatchy, Kevin G. Hall)

In search of a "poster child for the Great Recession." Hank Paulson's always a candidate.

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Envoy seeks to ditch 'bullying' US image (FT)

Louis Susman, Obama fundraiser and now U.S. ambassador to the U.K., announces that the Bush Era is officially over: "We are not a dumb power, we are not a bullying power." He adds: "To compare it to the previous relationship, well, some people might say that relationship wasn't healthy. Many people here in the UK didn't think it was healthy because it was without questioning and interaction."

MORE HEADLINES FOLLOW

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Madoff Investor's Art Dealer Got $26.5 Million in Rothko Sale (Bloomberg)

Madoff pal Ezra Merkin sells off art for $310 million to unknown buyer. Fee to mysterious agent (believed to be Kyra Sedgwick's stepfather) dwarfs mysterious buyer's agent fee. Cuomo skims off $191 million, puts it in escrow for Madoff's/Merkin's victims.

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Two years of pain and mega bonuses are back (Times U.K.)

Investment-banking is back in a big way, and investment bankers are popular once again. "Guaranteed multi-year bonuses, which have been attacked as the worst kind of banking excess, are back. ... It wasn't meant to be like this. Regulators were meant to change the rules to make sure that such bonuses would never be paid again. We had the Walker report on executive pay, and Barack Obama's strictures on remuneration in America. Funnily enough, they do not seem to have curbed banks' behaviour one bit."

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US food groups warn of sugar shortage (Telegraph U.K.)

If you consider Hershey, Mars, and Krispy Kreme "food groups."

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MADOFF'S MAN DODGES GUN, DRUG CHARGES (NY Post)

Frank DiPascali's deal "shut the door on other skeletons in his closet, including guns and drugs."

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MORE HEADLINES NEXT PAGE

Oil prices plunged — maybe because the speculators were too busy trying to fend off regulation during this week's CFTC hearings to manufacture a spike — and the stock market as a whole got dragged down.

As expected, the blowback from the formal announcement of the MicroHoo offensive against Google generated threats of regulatory scrutiny. And Jason Calcanis rips the deal this way: "Yahoo committed seppuku today."

Speaking of dying, the newspaper industry is not only no threat but is barely relevant to the MicroHoo/Google war. See Ken Doctor's "Microsoft-Yahoo Search Deal Leaves Newspapers on the Sidelines."

One of the better pieces on the highly entertaining Kosher Nostra sting of pols and rabbis for bribery and other business chicanery — another blow to a Jewish community reeling from momser Bernie Madoff's shanda — comes from Larry Cohler-Esses in the Jewish Daily Forward: "The Syrian-Jewish Community: Solidarity Forever or 'Medieval Minds, Armani Designs'?" Nathaniel Popper weighs in with "Ultra-Orthodox Rabbis Begin To Take Responsibility for Arrests and Scandals." As usual, the Forward tackle angles that the secular press won't touch for fear of being seen as antisemitic.

Bernie Madoff, in his first interview from the bowels of a prison, told a lawyer threatening to sue his wife, "There were several times that I met with the SEC and thought 'They got me,'" ABC's Brian Ross and Kate McCarthy are reporting. Lots more from the NY Post here.

Adding to the shock of that candid admission was the fact that Bernie, like other lifers, has apparently been working out and is the buffest septuagenarian in the North Carolina hoosegow.

The lawyer, Joseph Cotchett, got the interview after threatening to sue Madoff's wife, Ruth, his sons and brother Peter. Add Cotchett: "He cares about Ruth, but he doesn't give a ---- about his two sons, Mark and Andrew."

Yes, he can't believe he got away with it. Of course, he really didn't. Don't think for a minute that it was his conscience that drove him to confess last December to his sons. With the market plunging late last year, he knew the jig was up. There was no way that he could keep reporting healthy returns to his clients.

Where in the world is Bernie Madoff? Supposedly headed toward prison in Butner, North Carolina, Madoff is currently listed as being penned up in Atlanta.

It's like tracking a FedEx package — his prison number, if you're keeping track, is 61727-054. In Madoff's case, however, he's being deliberately sent to the wrong address. This prisoner of shanda requested the federal hoosegow in Otisville, New York, just a few hours north of NYC. Nope, said the vengeful authorities.

But at least there's a nice prison hospital at the Butner complex. Sort of an assisted-living facility. Click here for visiting hours.

At least one newspaper has money to burn. The Zimbabwean may be the world's most relevant paper; it definitely has the best ad campaign.