Bernard L. Madoff’s fraud is “stunning,” says the SEC. It is a crime of “epic proportions.” But, says the SEC, we have nothing to worry about. The SEC caught the bad guy. It “moved swiftly” to protect the integrity of the financial markets.

Nonsense.

The only thing “stunning” is that the SEC continues to condone and even fraternize with the organized mob of hedge fund miscreants who have destroyed hundreds of companies, wiped out the jobs of countless ordinary folks, and brought our financial system to the brink of ruin.

The Madoff case may one day prove to be “epic,” but right now it can best be described as “pathetic” – or just plain “weird.”

Apparently, the SEC began receiving tips from Madoff’s enemies (rival brokerages, private investigators working for rival hedge funds, etc.) several years ago. The commission made inquiries, but took no action.

Then, earlier this week, Madoff purportedly had some kind of nervous breakdown, announcing to his sons that he was a criminal.

If we can believe the news reports, the sons then called the FBI, which dispatched an agent to Madoff’s apartment.

Madoff, dressed in a baby blue bathrobe and slippers, opened the door, and said, “I know why you are here.”

With that, the agent arrested Madoff, and within a few hours the FBI and the SEC had whipped out cases accusing Madoff of wrong-doing, but providing few details.

Indeed, it is clear from reading these cases that the FBI and the SEC know nothing about Madoff’s market making and hedge fund firm except that two employees (Madoff’s two sons) have made the vague claim that Madoff told them, vaguely, that his hedge fund was “a giant Ponzi scheme.”

Madoff’s lawyer says his client has admitted to no such crime.

Children do not usually turn in their fathers to the FBI unless they bear other grudges. And it is standard operating procedure for shady high-finance predators to sniff out and prey on feuding relatives who are in business together.

This in no way suggests that Madoff is clean, but it raises the possibility that even dirtier people orchestrated the demise of Madoff and his hedge fund in order to absorb his more lucrative (and crooked?) market making operation.

An alternative explanation comes from Bill Cara, one of the nation’s more perceptive business writers. He concludes that Madoff “is just the beginning. I don’t know, of course, more than you, but…I think he has in fact indicted himself to cause prosecutors to investigate the entire corrupt system.”

Whatever the real story, it is clear that market makers are accessories to a scheme that is much, much bigger than Madoff.

The key players in this scheme are 20 or so mega-billionaire hedge fund managers, who operate with a supporting cast that includes not just market makers, but also smaller hedge funds, rogue prime brokerages, corrupt lawyers, dishonest journalists, bogus one-man credit rating agencies, dubious index trackers, bribed “experts,” skalawag statisticians, compromised professors, private investigators, crooked financial researchers, captured government regulators, hustlers, felons, thugs and mafiosi.

The mega-billionaires masterminded their scheme in the 1980s, and ever since, they and their progeny have been working together – raiding and destroying public companies for profit. In the rubble of these attacks (there are hundreds of examples) one can almost always find evidence of unrestrained naked short selling (people selling things that they do not possess – phantom stock, phantom bonds, phantom mortgage backed securities, phantom CDOs, all manner of phantom derivatives).

This is the organized exploitation of our national clearing and settlement system – a system that fails utterly to ensure that traders actually deliver that which they have sold. If the SEC and FBI are looking for a “Ponzi scheme” of “epic proportions” – this is it.

Mr. Madoff surely knows something about this scheme. Market makers (Madoff’s operation was among the better known) are exempt from rules prohibiting naked short selling. They can sell stock that they have not yet borrowed or purchased, so long as they are legitimately “making a market” (i.e. maintaining liquidity) — and only if they intend to settle the trade soon after. In practice, however, billionaire hedge fund managers have rented market makers’ exemptions to manipulate markets with phantom securities – a blatant crime that is rarely prosecuted.

While Mr. Madoff is talking to the SEC and the FBI, I am going to begin telling you more about the scheme that is bigger than Bernie. Soon, I will name those 20 mega-billionaires, their supporting cast — and the man who is their guru. The evidence is pouring in – there is much to reveal.

But for now, let me leave you with a quotation from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority’s “Notice 93-77.” Published in 1993, it reads:

Shortly after the market crash of 1987, “then Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady referred to the clearance and settlement system as the weakest link in the nation’s financial system…Gerald Corrigan, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York noted: ‘The greatest threat to the stability of the financial system as a whole was the danger of a major default in one of these clearing and settlement systems…”

“The connection between a crisis in the clearance and settlement system and the financial industry was highlighted by the bankruptcy in 1990 of Drexel Burnham Lambert Group…As described in the [SEC’s] testimony before the Senate Banking Committee, near gridlock developed in the mortgage-backed securities market and in the corporate debt and equity markets where Drexel was an active participant.”

Now that our financial system has come to a screeching halt, read those words for clues as to how much worse things can get – and whom we need to stop to prevent that from happening.

* * * * * * * *

Mark Mitchell is a reporter for DeepCapture.com. He previously worked at the Wall Street Journal editorial page in Europe, Time magazine Asia, the Far Eastern Economic Review, and the Columbia Journalism Review. Email: mitch0033@gmail.com

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A couple of days before Lehman fell and all hell broke loose on Wall Street, Floyd Norris, the chief business correspondent of The New York Times, published a blog (headline: “Short Sale Conspiracies”) wherein he implied that I was mentally insane for suggesting that Deutsche Bank Securities had been caught selling “massive amounts of phantom stock.”

I promise to take this up with my psychiatrist, but first let me tell you a bit more about the peculiar case that led the New York Stock Exchange to hand Deutsche Bank Securities the largest fine in history for violations of SEC rules designed to prevent the creation of what the chairman of the SEC has called “phantom stock.”

The NYSE’s disciplinary order states that Deutsche Bank’s traders “effected an unquantified but significant number of short sales…without having borrowed the securities.” Indeed, the traders sold the shares “without having any reasonable grounds to believe that the securities could be borrowed for delivery when due…”

This is a clear-cut case of abusive naked short selling – traders selling stock without bothering to even check whether the stock could be obtained. In other words, Deutsche Bank’s traders were selling phantom stock, and it appears that they were doing this systematically over the course of the 22 month time period (ending in October 2006) that the NYSE investigated.

I asked NYSE spokesman Scott Peterson how much stock Deutsche Bank sold without knowing that the stock could be borrowed. He said, “We’re not saying how much, but let me put it this way: It was A LOT.” (The emphasis was his.)

Interestingly, however, the NYSE pointedly did not include the words “naked short selling” anywhere in its written disciplinary action. And the Big Board’s spokesman went to great lengths to suggest that Deutsche Bank was not engaged in naked short selling. “This is a case of failure to locate stock,” the spokesman said. “We’re being careful not to call it ‘failure to deliver’ stock.”

Mr. Peterson referred me to a section of the NYSE’s disciplinary order where it says that “according to [Deutsche Bank’s] delivery records,” there were “only two failures to deliver.”

So Deutsche Bank systematically failed to even locate the stock that it sold, but the NYSE isn’t calling it “naked short selling,” and Deutsche Bank managed to deliver the stock in a timely fashion in all but two instances.

Does this seem strange to you? It should.

SEC rules give short sellers three trading days to borrow and deliver real shares. If the stock is not produced within three days, it is called a “failure to deliver.” If a company’s shares “fail to deliver” in excessive quantities, the SEC puts the company on the so-called “threshold” list of publicly listed firms that are likely victims of improper naked short selling.

When I pressed Mr. Peterson, the NYSE spokesman, he conceded that there were not “only two cases of failure to deliver.” In fact, Deutsche Bank routinely failed to deliver specific securities–all of which appeared on the SEC’s threshold list. When I asked how much stock Deutsche Bank failed to deliver, Mr. Peterson said, again, “a LOT.”

So what was this “only two cases of failure to deliver”? It turns out that there were only two instances (among the sample of questionable trades for which it was charged) where Deutsche Bank still had not delivered the stock after thirteen days. Surely the NYSE must have known that failures to deliver of three to thirteen days are considered by the SEC to be improper naked short sales. At the time of the Deutsche case (the rules have since been changed slightly) day thirteen was the point at which the SEC would hand the delinquent naked short sellers a pathetically light penalty, forcing them to forfeit their short positions by buying back (rather than borrowing) shares.

In practice, this 13-day rule only encouraged stock manipulation. Some traders, correctly reckoning that the SEC would do nothing, simply left stock undelivered for weeks or months at a time. But a great deal of abusive naked short selling involved traders who sold phantom stock and (obviously) failed to deliver it on day three, and then absorbed the “penalty” on day 13 – purchasing (rather than borrowing) the stock and delivering it.

As soon as they closed out their “short” positions (which were fake positions since they never intended to borrow the stock), the traders would immediately sell another batch of phantom stock and leave that undelivered until day 13. By the end of each of these 13 day periods, the phantom shares had, of course, diluted supply and watered down the price (at which point it was hardly a “penalty” to have to buy back the stock).

A great number of the companies that appear on the SEC’s “threshold” list have been subjected to precisely this pattern of abuse. And if I understand the NYSE spokesman correctly, this is what Deutsche Bank was up to – short selling phantom stock with no intention of borrowing shares, waiting to buy (rather than borrow) the cheaper shares at day thirteen, and then selling more phantom stock, targeting the same threshold-listed company, the very next day.

Deutsche Bank did this week after week for at least two years.

Predictably, the SEC has not gone after anyone in the Deutsche Bank case. Instead, it leaves the NYSE to render its “largest ever” fine – a mere $500,000, which is many millions, if not billions, of dollars less than what the bank earned from its illegal activity.

And the question remains: Why is the NYSE failing to call this illegal activity by its proper name: “naked short selling”?

When the NYSE levied its fine at the end of August, the scandal of naked short selling was beginning to receive nationwide attention. Indeed, the SEC had just lifted a temporary emergency order designed to prevent the crime – three weeks after stating that abusive naked short selling had the potential to topple the American financial system.

Moreover, Deutsche Bank had recently become embroiled in a multi-billion dollar lawsuit filed by shareholders alleging that Deutsche and several other banks were involved in a “conspiracy to engage in illegal naked short selling of Taser International Inc. and to create, loan and sell counterfeit shares of Taser stock.”

Clearly, Deutsche Bank had reason to keep its involvement in naked short selling under wraps. I asked Mr. Peterson whether the NYSE had cut a deal with Deutsche Bank, whereby Deutsche agreed to pay the fine, and the NYSE agreed to portray its case as something other than a clear-cut instance of abusive naked short selling.

Mr. Peterson told me to put my question in writing. I did this, and waited for several weeks for a response. No response was forthcoming.

Another interesting question is whether Deutsche Bank’s prime brokerage (which services hedge fund clients) was involved in the naked short selling. If it was, this would suggest that the bank was helping its hedge fund clients manipulate stocks, including, perhaps, Taser International, whose shareholders had filed that multi-billion dollar lawsuit.

The NYSE disciplinary actions makes it seem like only Deutsche Bank’s proprietary traders (who trade for the bank, not for any hedge fund clients) had broken the rules. When I asked Mr. Peterson about this, he said, yes, the prime brokerage was not involved.

However, the NYSE’s disciplinary action said, in legalese, with no explanation, that at least two of the five Deutsche Bank proprietary trading desks investigated by the NYSE “failed to adhere to the independent trading unit aggregation requirements.” This was a reference to SEC “unit aggregation” rules, outlined in Regulation SHO, which prohibit prime brokerage units and proprietary trading units from coordinating their short-selling activities.

In other words, it seems possible that Deutsche Bank’s proprietary trading unit was washing naked short positions for its prime brokerage, which had placed phantom stock sales on behalf of market manipulating hedge fund clients.

I asked Mr. Peterson if this was the case. He said to put the question in writing. I did this, and waited a few weeks for a response. No response was forthcoming.

Apparently, Mr. Norris, the chief financial correspondent of the New York Times, spoke to the NYSE, because he regurgitates its party line, almost verbatim. He says the case against Deutsche Bank is “largely about the failure to locate shares before they were sold short…But there do not seem to be many cases of sustained failures to deliver.”

He goes on to improperly define “failures to deliver” as occurring on day 13. He buys into the suspect claim that Deutsche Bank’s prime brokerage wasn’t involved. And he implies that the case could be a matter of “record keeping violations,” apparently unaware that these “record keeping violations” were in fact brazen failures to deliver of unborrowable stock – typically lasting right up to day 13, when the traders “penalized” themselves by buying back the shares, no doubt at a steep discount to the price at which they had sold them.

Mr. Norris concludes, “I don’t know if Mr. Mitchell’s suggestion [that Deutsche Bank sold massive amounts of phantom stock] is nutty or prescient, but I do not see how it is supported by what the Big Board says it found.”

Of course, what the Big Board says it found might be quite different from what the Big Board did find. That a prescient nut case has to point this out to the presumably sane chief financial correspondent of the New York Times speaks volumes about the media’s coverage of the naked short selling scandal and the state of America’s public discourse.

* * * * * * * *

So the SEC today lifted its ban on short-selling, and all but declared open season for law-breaking naked short sellers to start destroying companies again – and who does CNBC have on for two hours as its honored “guest host”?

None other than Jim Chanos, the salamander-slick director of the short-seller lobby.

Asked about naked short selling, Chanos said, with a straight face: “Anytime a hedge fund or short seller shorts a stock, it is a legitimate short. We have to get a locate or pre-borrow from the broker….”

Chanos continued: “The one thing I have in common with Patrick Byrne, chairman of Overstock.com [and Deep Capture reporter], is that we are calling for strict, strict delivery…in terms of delivering shares…that is how to end this naked short selling…”

CNBC, which serves as a sort of seedy massage parlor to the short selling community, gave Chanos the usual treatment – lubrications and sweet nothings. No tough questions. No retorts to his outlandish assertions. No wondering aloud as to his absurd and self-serving logic.

Let’s get this straight.

Not long ago, Chanos insisted that naked short selling did not occur.

Now, he says naked short selling occurs. But it’s not short sellers who are naked short selling. Short sellers make sure their brokers borrow real stock before they sell it.

In any case, Chanos acknowledges that short sellers’ brokers are not borrowing real stock before they sell it. That is why they are not delivering the stock. And that is why he claims to agree with Patrick Byrne that there needs to be “strict, strict delivery.”

But Chanos is against a ban on naked short selling (which would force short sellers to borrow real stock, thus ensuring delivery). Chanos says that a ban on naked short selling would destroy “market efficiency.”

So, to summarize the Chanos position: Naked short selling didn’t occur, but now it occurs, except short sellers don’t do it, and the SEC shouldn’t ban it because the market would cease to function properly if short sellers were forced to stop doing what they don’t do.

And given that so many shares are failing to deliver (after being sold naked by short sellers who never sell naked), Chanos is calling for “strict, strict delivery” of stock (while praising the SEC for its “strict” new rules which stipulate that nothing happens to short sellers who fail to deliver stock).

CNBC treated us this morning to two hours of Chanos nonsense. At one point this charlatan even insisted that short sellers aren’t short selling financial stocks at all. Really, he said short sellers aren’t short selling. Period. Take his word for it. CNBC did.

That was around 7:30 AM, right after CNBC’s Becky Quick referred to Chanos as “the legendary short seller….er, investor.”

At 9:30 AM, the markets opened and the criminal naked short sellers…er, investors…went back to work, unfettered by the SEC’s “strict” new rules.

Within an hour, Morgan Stanley was down 25%.

* * * * * * * * *

Folks, today was history in the making. The Deep Capture thesis, which is that miscreant short-sellers have put the American financial system at risk, can no longer be in doubt.

First came the stunning announcement that the SEC has sent subpoenas to 50 hedge fund managers as part of a major investigation into rumor-mongering and illegal short-selling of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. Then came the even more remarkable announcement from SEC Chairman Christopher Cox that he is instituting an “emergency action” requiring traders to pre-borrow stock before shorting all “substantial” financial companies.

Of course, there is a some bitter irony here. Over the years, hundreds of public companies have been grievously wounded by hedge funds who sell phantom stock (ie. stock they have not borrowed), and the SEC has done nothing. Now Wall Street finance companies, including the very investment banks whose prime brokerages facilitated the creation of phantom stock, find themselves victimized by phantom stock, and the government decides it’s time to do – or at least, say – something about it.

We’d be glad to see the big banks suffer their Shakespearean fates if the SEC were to rescue the hundreds of innocent victim companies who have been hollering about the phantom stock problem for years. We’ll see if the SEC extends the emergency action to the rest of the market, as Mr. Cox suggested it might.

Either way, all the talk of an “emergency” suggests that the SEC recognizes just how big the phantom stock problem has become. Obviously, it sees the catastrophe of Bear Stearns as a clear-cut case of short-seller abuse. A well-timed false rumor, presented as fact by CNBC, combined with phantom stock sales, took the bank down. Now, the same people are using the same tactics against Lehman Brothers. Fannie and Freddie are on the brink. And experts say there are 300-plus other publicly traded companies – including 50 finance companies — getting similarly clobbered.

An “emergency,” indeed.

All of which makes certain journalists look like bona fide clowns. For years, a clique of influential reporters—I call them “the Media Mob”–have insisted that short-sellers do no wrong and that phantom stock is not a problem. On Friday, Deep Capture noted that the media’s hedge fund apologists, including Joe Nocera of the New York Times, had shied away from commenting on the collapse of Bear Stearns.

The next day, Joe Nocera of the New York Times commented on the collapse of Bear Stearns. Predictably, he argued that short-sellers had nothing to do with it. He wrote, “it takes some gall for Bear Stearns to blame short sellers for its failure…what Bear Stearns management fails to mention is how much of its capital was tied up in subprime sludge.”

The sludge, Joe, is not the point. As your close friend Jim Cramer has described (behind closed doors, if not on CNBC), “the game” of market manipulation is to find a weakness and amplify it out of all proportion to reality. It is one thing to say that Bear’s balance sheet was weak (I agree, Bear was a piece of crap). It is quite another thing to get a compliant television reporter (in this case, Cramer crony David Faber, on CNBC) to spark a run on the bank by reporting, as if it were fact, the completely false and utterly catastrophic news that Goldman Sachs had cut off Bear Stearns’ credit – and to do that while somebody’s selling millions of shares that do not exist.

As we said last week, the SEC shouldn’t just subpoena the hedge funds: It should subpoena CNBC’s David Faber. He says a hedge fund “friend” gave him that information about Goldman cutting off Bear’s credit. That hedge fund “friend” very likely broke the law. The SEC needs to find out who he is. Journalists have no constitutional right to cover up crimes under the guise of protecting sources.

But short-sellers don’t commit crimes. So says the Media Mob. Why do they say this? The kindest explanation is that Nocera and crowd honestly believe that it is simply too dangerous to criticize shorts because shorts are so absolutely “vital” – the only people able to provide negative information to the markets and the media. This worn notion fails, of course, to make the distinction between law-abiding short-sellers who provide real analysis and crooks who circulate scurrilous lies while churning out phantom stock.

It also contains a stunning admission: that the financial media is incapable of conducting financial research on its own. Journalists consider short-sellers “vital” sources of negative information because journalists do not have the wherewithal to look at a balance sheet and determine for themselves whether something might be wrong. Baffled by all those numbers, the journalists turn to short-sellers (and sometimes even convicted criminals) for help. Which is another way of saying that our financial media is written in large part by financially motivated Wall Street sharks–a real abomination, when you think about it.

But in the case of Nocera, there is something even more sinister at play. To understand Joe Nocera’s positions on short-selling, it is necessary to understand the crowd he runs with. It is a clique of journalists and short-selling hedge funds, most of whom are connected in some way to CNBC’s Jim Cramer.

Some journalists challenge power; this clique of journalists covet it. They desire nothing more than to be players in “the game.” (Some are quite blatant about this; witness Nocera pal Herb Greenberg, who sells “forensic” research to short-sellers while using them as sources in his CNBC reporting).

These journalists defend their short-selling friends at all costs. They routinely pat each other on the back and pimp each others’ books. They quote each other in their stories, and snicker almost out loud as they attack the same public companies, always parroting the same financial analysis, delivered to them by the same small group of dubious hedge fund managers.

This is an old boys and girls network tighter than anything on Capitol Hill – and infinitely more saddening, because the media’s not supposed to be this way. .

You could see this network at work in the case of Gradient Analytics, a research shop that publishes blatantly false information for short-selling hedge fund managers, many of whom are connected to Cramer. For awhile, Jon Markman, a former editor for Cramer’s website, TheStreet.com, was running a dodgy hedge fund out of Gradient’s back offices, while one of Gradient’s managers was accumulating multiple identities and social security numbers to conceal his activities.

At the same time, the Media Mob, including CNBC’s Herb Greenberg, who was Markman’s former co-editor at TheStreet.com, churned out stories containing Gradient’s false information about companies that also happened to be victimized by phantom stock – and still more stories labeling anyone who mentioned the words “phantom stock” or “naked shorting” as “loony” or “seeing UFOs.” A former Gradient employee testified under oath that Herb conspired with Gradient and a hedge fund manager named David Rocker so that Rocker could illegally profit from his stories on CNBC and Marketwatch.com.

When the SEC launched an investigation into Gradient, and issued subpoenas to Jim Cramer and Herb Greenberg, the Media Mob rose up in their defense. Pathetically, the SEC allowed itself to be terrorized by this mob, and closed down its investigation before enforcing the subpoenas. When I began a story about this for the Columbia Journalism Review, the Media Mob turned on me. Joe Nocera called my editor to defend Herb and pressure CJR to kill my investigation. (This was unheard of; working journalists do not make quiet calls to try to have stories killed).

Then Nocera, Herb, and their friend Dan Colarusso, of the New York Post, sat on a famous panel at the Society of Business Editors and Writers. The panel’s stated mission was to defeat “business journalism bashers” – namely, Deep Capture reporter Patrick Byrne and Bob O’Brien, a.k.a. the “Easter Bunny,” a devastatingly effective blogger who had been writing about the media’s failure to cover the problem of phantom stock.

A Deep Capture ally snuck into Nocera’s panel and got it all on tape (see “The Story of Deep Capture” for the recording). Colarusso vowed to “crush” Patrick and the Easter Bunny with “barrels of ink.” Herb said that he wouldn’t write about phantom stock because it’s “not what I do” – even though a majority of the companies he had written about were phantom stock victims. Nocera, meanwhile, said that naked short-selling (phantom stock selling) “makes his eyes glaze over” and he “can’t be bothered” to cover it because “life is too short.”

Maybe so, but before and after that panel, Nocera wrote columns insisting that short-sellers do no wrong and phantom stock is not a problem – even though he had been presented with heaps of data proving otherwise. Nocera’s columns, widely circulated and praised by the Media Mob, contained no data and not a single reference to a credible source. One of his columns quoted, as an expert — Herb. Another column quoted the expert Roddy Boyd, then a reporter for the New York Post.

I know why Nocera quoted Roddy – Roddy’s a card-carrying member of the Media Mob who has worked closely with criminals doing dirty work for Cramer-affiliated short-sellers. (See “The Story of Deep Capture” for more on this.) Still, this was something amazing: the New York Times quoting a New York Post reporter as an expert! You’d think some editor somewhere would have wondered about this. (Roddy Boyd, now with Fortune, is, not incidentally, one of the few reporters still insisting that short-sellers of Bear Stearns and Lehman have done no wrong).

Last month, after we named Nocera in “The Story of Deep Capture,” Nocera wrote a column in which he was critical of Milberg Weiss, the law firm that was caught paying kickbacks to plaintiffs who filed bogus class-action lawsuits against public companies. He wrote, “I’ve long thought that [Milberg] ran a kind of extortion racket, filing class-action lawsuits against companies whose stock had dropped – without a shred of evidence that any wrongdoing had taken place – and then torturing them with legal motions until they settled.”

What Nocera did not mention (though we made it clear in “The Story of Deep Capture,” which Nocera had read) is that Milberg Weiss coordinated its attacks on public companies with short-selling hedge funds, skeezy “independent research” shops (most notably, Gradient Analytics) and Nocera’s media friends.

Indeed, a Gradient timesheet, obtained by Deep Capture, shows that while Gradient was allegedly colluding with Herb Greenberg, its employees were getting paid by the hour to work for Milberg Weiss. .

But Herb is a friend of Nocera, Gradient’s short-selling clients are friends of Herb – and well, you know how it works. These journalists don’t get their friends in trouble. Indeed, check their work – not one of them, in all their years, has ever identified, or even hinted at, a single instance of short-seller wrongdoing.

In his most recent article apologizing for the short-sellers who destroyed Bear Stearns, Nocera refers extensively to one of our favorite hedge fund managers, Jim Chanos, of the aptly named Kynikos (“Cynical,” in Greek) Partners. This is the fellow who provided a rent-free beach mansion to a hooker employed by Elliot Spitzer, who was Jim Cramer’s college roommate. Chanos is also the fellow who helped Bethany McLean of Fortune magazine break the Enron story, which partially explains why his media fans seem to believe he can do no wrong. Everything he says–including his reassurances that phantom stock doesn’t exist–is reported as fact.

So now, Nocera reports that Chanos believes that, in the case of Bear Stearns, there were no crimes committed by short-sellers. And, according to Nocera, Chanos “knows what he’s talking about. In the last days of Bear Stearns’ death spiral, a top executive called Mr. Chanos, who was not short the stock but had been a client for years. The executive pleaded with him to go on CNBC and tell the world that all was well at Bear Stearns…Mr. Chanos declined the request.”

This is at least partly false. Good sources tell us that Chanos was short Bear Stearns, though he may have already cashed out “in the last days” of the “death spiral.” As for that “top executive” at Bear Stearns, he seemed to be doing his job by asking people to vouch for his company. Surely, he has nothing to hide. Why does Nocera keep him anonymous? Did Nocera check to see if this person even existed? Well, anything’s possible.

In any case, it is entirely misleading to suggest, as Nocera does, that Chanos really believed that Bear Stearns was not a victim of rumor-mongers. In fact, Chanos believed that it was quite possible that hedge funds were circulating false information about Bear Stearns.

We know Chanos suspected as much because he said so at a recent conference of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. Clearly trying to distance himself from this scandal, Chanos said, “I would urge our regulators at home to examine the sources of these [rumors], whether there’s evidence that people are trading on information they know to be false and inducing others to trade on information they know to be false, which is against the law and always has been…”

On CNBC, Jim Cramer is similarly insisting that illegal short-selling should be stopped. This is a far cry from a year ago, when he said the issue is the most “falsely overweighted topic on Wall Street,” and phantom stock selling is something that happens “very rarely.” Today, he said “hundreds” of companies have been affected, adding, preposterously, that he has long been on a “crusade to bring back honest short-selling.” Cramer, like Chanos, seems intent on distancing himself from the scandal that they helped cover up for the past three years.

Message to Media Mob: The rest of you should also start to distance yourself from this scandal. Do it quickly – before somebody exposes the enormous fraud that you have perpetrated on the American public.

For the complete, very long tale of how a clique of journalists helped cover-up a massive crime on Wall Street, see “The Story of Deep Capture.”