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.

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.

Cocaine! Shiksas! Oy! Put yourself in Bernie Madoff's office space. See page 47 of the new amended complaint in Wexler v. Tremont.

When Bernie Madoff wasn't slapping on his yarmulke to go rip off fellow Jews, he was using their money to slap the bare asses of shiksa strippers and escorts and fill his nose with cocaine. Right there in his offices in the Lipstick Building. And he was letting his feeder-fund pals into the fun.

Shiksas gone wild! No wonder the guy didn't make a single trade. He didn't have time. That's the story in court papers filed just yesterday in the monumental Wexler case against the Ponzi schemer.

Check out the new filings in the New York state court case, Wexler v. Tremont Partners. It's free reading, but you have jump through some hoops. Start here, use this case number, 101615/2009, and go to the October 20 amended complaint.

Trustee Irving Picard slapped a $200 million suit today on Bernie Madoff's brother, Peter; sons, Mark and Andrew; and niece Shana. Give back those ill-gotten gains, said Picard, going where no Madoff-related lawsuit had gone before.

Check out the official announcement at Picard's site.

Maybe this will finally shake loose some real information on the likelihood of the Madoff clan's involvement as more than clueless bystanders.

Peter Madoff definitely was more than a bystander, though whether he was clueless about Bernie's scam hasn't been determined. Why say that about Peter? Because he was a high muckety-muck (even higher than Bernie) in the securities industry's powerful lobbying group. For years. During the scam.

And as we already know, Peter Madoff invested a student's money in Bernie's scheme, was sued, and reached a settlement with the kid.

This new suit by Picard should shake loose a bunch of new facts, and then we'll probably see that, in the Madoff scandal, the apples didn't fall very far from the tree.

Detail of Chen Wenling's Wall Street bull pinning a Bernie Madoff-like figure to the wall.

Chen Wenling's "What You See Might Not Be Real" (detail shown above from a Beijing gallery) is pretty cool (and so are some of his other sculptures), and he's gotten some buzz for its bull/Bernie Madoff statement. But it misses that point entirely — unless the bull is Bernie Madoff's prison cellmate and not the Wall Street symbol.

Wall Street didn't kill Madoff, and Madoff didn't kill Wall Street. Madoff's Ponzi scheme isn't emblematic of anything Recession-related, and if he winds up symbolizing the era, that's a shame. If anything he was yet another victim of the Wall Street meltdown, because his phony reports of ever-increasing profits couldn't withstand comparisons with a simultaneously crashing market. The meltdown made the exposure of his scheme inevitable.

The Wall Street meltdown certainly wasn't caused by Madoff. It didn't spring (in general) from illegal acts, but from overly greedy, hubristic behavior that was legal but morally reprehensible and fiscally reckless.

That said, Madoff does have a lot to atone for — especially his ripoff of his fellow millionaires. He got excused from his North Carolina prison duties the other day for Yom Kippur, though he's always struck me as pretty unrepentant.

Before the atone-deaf thief was sent back to his cell, we hope he had time to wind up his Yom Kippur prayers with a joyful "Next year in Butner Federal Correctional Complex!"

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.

The Republicans' Deaf Ear Is a Preexisting Condition (WashPost, Dana Milbank)

Funny piece on the first day of the Senate's "debate" on the health-care bill. GOP senator Jim Bunning declared he was against the bill, no matter what form, and then he promptly fell asleep. The Republicans might as well have sung "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It," Groucho Marx's bit from Horse Feathers (1932). Or just stayed home to watch re-plays of former colleague Tom DeLay dancing with the stars.

A New Bubble Of the Fed's Creation (WashPost, Steven Pearlstein)

Stimulus packages boost the market so much that, well, another boom is underway. Here's an example of excessive greedsters feasting on carcasses artificially bloated by government money, from the WSJ: "Speculators Seek Fortune in AIG." The NY Post notes that Lehman alums are setting up funds to pick at the carcass of their failed bank. Stocks are rising and traders are waiting with bated breath as the Fed meets this week to figure what, if any, action it will take.

Delayed Foreclosures Stalk Market (WSJ)

Though some foreclosures are being delayed out of good intentions to help beleaguered homeowners, "some analysts believe the delays are prolonging the mortgage crisis and creating a growing 'shadow' inventory of pent-up supply that will eventually hit the market."

A Teflon Rally Running on Volume Fumes (Seeking Alpha, Babak)

Warning: "... this rally is the largest one powered by the least volume ..." Even crazier, an astonishing share of volume has been from a mere handful of stocks. See Liam Denning's "Smoke Signals From the Stock Rally" in the WSJ.

Prosecutors say half of Bernie Madoff's investors lost nothing in Ponzi scheme (NY Daily News)

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Hot off the server from Wayne State University's law school is Peter Henning's "Should the SEC Spin Off the Enforcement Division?" Amid all the whining about the SEC, this is a question that has so far eluded most of the press — I mean, the question itself has, let alone any debate or discussion.

Law prof Henning, a white-collar-crime maven, raises the question about whether the Justice Department ought to take over the prosecutorial part of the SEC, its enforcement division — which, as we know, doesn't do that good a job enforcing.

I like the way the guy cuts through the bullshit swirling around the SEC to get to the point of how the SEC dropped the ball on the Madoff caper — and how that is a problem stemming from the very nature of the SEC and thus will happen again and again and again.

From page 21 of the executive summary of the Kotz report on the SEC's bungling of the Madoff case.

Until we get to see the entire Kotz report on the SEC's monumental failure regarding Bernie Madoff, the above anecdote, from near the end of the executive summary, will have to do.

Picture, if you will, the look on the face of Madoff's lawyer when he realized that the SEC enforcement staff actually believed him when he lied to their faces. Even if he'd burst out laughing, they probably still wouldn't have caught on.

Don't blame Madoff's lawyer (unnamed in this report) for lying. That's what lawyers do on behalf of their clients. Blame the SEC enforcement staff — of all people — for taking lawyers' statements at face value.

It would have been so much better if it had turned out that Bernie Madoff corrupted SEC personnel into overlooking his Ponzi scheme.

But it turns out (executive summary here) that apparently the SEC was honest but stupid. Like Forrest Gump.

You can live with a regulatory agency that makes mistakes because of a few bad apples. But an agency with a brain the consistency of applesauce is of no use to anybody — except to schemers like Madoff.