By some quirk of human psychology, it remains difficult for a certain segment of the population to accept the “deep capture” thesis – the notion that our nation’s regulatory bodies and parts of our media have been “captured” (at times, outright “corrupted”) by a powerful, moneyed elite. “No way,” we are told. “Maybe in Nigeria. Europe, sure. But to think it happens in America? That’s a conspiracy theory.”

Yeah? Well, read this:

That is an email to Paul Berger, then the associate director of enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission. The author, a Washington lawyer, is referring to Ralph Ferrara, a former SEC lawyer who apparently managed to parlay his government service into mansions, maids and millions – by way of a plum position at a law firm called Debevoise & Plimpton.

As you can see, the email was sent in January 2005, soon after the SEC had launched an investigation into alleged naked short selling, insider trading and other misconduct at Pequot Capital, a powerful hedge fund. That same month, the SEC’s lead investigator in the case, Gary Aguirre, was shut out of meetings in which the Commission’s top officials gave Pequot’s lawyers privileged information about the investigation.

By the summer of 2005, some of the SEC’s top officials, including Paul Berger, were maneuvering to have the Pequot investigation whitewashed. When Aguirre tried to interview John Mack, formerly chairman of Pequot and then CEO of Morgan Stanley, he was told to lay off because Mack’s lawyers had “juice” with Berger and SEC Director of Enforcement Linda Thomsen.

Aguirre complained about this in a formal letter to Berger. In response, Berger arranged for Aguirre to be fired – never mind that the SEC had just commended Aguirre for his “unmatched dedication.” At precisely the same time, Berger told Mack’s law firm that he was quite ready to leave public service, and that what he’d really like is to have a job at Mack’s law firm. The name of Mack’s law firm (the law firm with “juice”) was Debevoise & Plimpton – i.e., the same law firm whose multi-million dollar paychecks to former SEC officials had inspired that salivating email.

Perhaps the lawyer who sent that email was merely updating Berger on his colleague’s career trajectory. I have no evidence that the lawyer was trying to influence Berger or the SEC. But the email is a good example of the kinds of conversations that occur with disturbing regularity at our nation’s market regulator. No doubt, those maids and millions were top of mind as the SEC’s associate director of enforcement considered whether he ought to bury an investigation into some serious crimes, fire the whistleblower, and simultaneously apply for a job at the alleged criminal’s law firm.

In the summer of 2006, Aguirre wrote an 18-page letter to the U.S. Congress, blowing this scandal wide open. In this letter, Aguirre noted that his rank-and-file colleagues at the SEC believed that the naked short selling they were investigating had the “potential to seriously injure the financial markets.” So it was all the more appalling when–in November, 2006–the SEC leadership officially closed the investigation into Pequot. In doing so, the SEC said it had found no evidence of insider trading, but it said nothing about the far more serious charges of naked short selling and market manipulation.

Two U.S. Senate Committees spent more than a year looking into this matter. In multiple reports (one more than 700 pages long), Senate investigators did not refer directly to “naked short selling,” but from their descriptions of “market manipulation” and “wash sales” (which are often used to hide naked shorts) it is clear that they believed that Pequot engaged in naked short selling, and that this crime did, indeed, have the potential to “seriously injure the financial markets.”

The Senate concluded that everything about the case – the special treatment received by Pequot and Mack’s lawyers, Aguirre’s dismissal, Berger’s solicitation of Debevoise & Plimpton – was as seedy as can be.

“At worse,” the U.S. Senate stated in one report, “the picture is colored with tones of a possible cover-up.”

Last month – after naked short selling and other hedge fund tricks contributed to the biggest financial cataclysm since 1929 – the SEC inspector general issued a 191-page report confirming just about everything in the U.S. Senate reports. It is impossible to read these reports without concluding that this is the biggest scandal in the history of the SEC–a scandal that entailed a cover-up of precisely those same crimes that “severely injured” (or rather, nearly vaporized) our financial markets.

The SEC leadership responded to the inspector general last week by assigning an SEC employee, who happened to be an administrative judge, but who had no jurisdiction and was not acting in her capacity as a judge, to issue a short document stating that the SEC was innocent – that nobody had acted inappropriately in the case of Aguirre and Pequot Capital. With this document in hand, the SEC announced that it had been “cleared” by “a judge” – making it sound as if there had been some sort of official, independent ruling.

In other words, the corrupt SEC leadership tried to convince us that the corrupt SEC leadership would have the final say on whether the SEC’s leadership was corrupt. The cover-up continued. There was a time when the nation’s journalists would swarm on an abomination such as this. But, alas, there was hardly a peep from our media. Indeed, The Wall Street Journal and other publications helpfully reported that a “judge” had “cleared” the SEC leadership of wrong-doing.

But this scandal is not under the rug yet. And it might grow in magnitude. In a civil case brought by Aguirre, a federal district court ruled earlier this year that the SEC is far from “cleared,” and that it must hand over thousands of internal documents pertaining to the Pequot investigation. The SEC has largely ignored the ruling, turning over documents with much of the relevant stuff blacked out, but it is doubtful that the commission will get away with this. Tomorrow, the court will hold a hearing at which the SEC will likely be ordered to hand over more documents – including those containing evidence of the “market manipulation” (read: “naked short selling”) that helped “seriously injure the financial markets.”

Meanwhile, Paul Berger, the former associate director of enforcement who tried to bury this case, has been made partner at the law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton. I’d tell you how much he’s getting paid for his “juice,” but I hesitate to incite a citizen insurrection.

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Mark Mitchell previously worked as a writer for the Wall Street Journal editorial page, chief business correspondent for Time Magazine in Asia, and as the editor responsible for the Columbia Journalism Review’s online critique of business journalism. Send tips to mitch0033@gmail.com

If this article concerns you, and you wish to help, then:

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There was an article in The New York Times yesterday about the SEC’s disgraceful ruling that it will take no disciplinary action against the SEC cronies at the center of the Gary Aguirre scandal. Read through the Times’ false veneer of objectivity, and it seems that reporter Walt Bogdanich is trying to say that it’s pretty damn strange that a corrupt SEC has been allowed to adjudicate its own corruption.

Stranger still, no other journalist has expressed outrage over this. Meanwhile, the nation’s mainstream media (The New York Times included) has yet to deliver a story describing the Aguirre scandal’s most important component – the bit that makes it the greatest scandal in the history of the SEC and which helps explain why the commission failed to stop a crime that later contributed to the near total collapse of the American financial system.

Readers of the mainstream media know only that Aguirre is the former SEC attorney who claimed that he was fired for political reasons after pursuing an “insider trading” case against Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack and a hedge fund called Pequot Capital. The real story – the one you don’t read in the papers – is that Aguirre has, all along, made it perfectly clear that his investigation – the one he says that Mack “stopped in its tracks” – was about much more than the relatively minor crime of “insider trading.”

Aguirre blew this scandal wide open in 2006, when he wrote an 18-page letter to the U.S. Congress. The letter reads: “I believe our capital markets face a growing risk from lightly or unregulated hedge funds just as our markets did in the 1920s from unregulated pools of money – then called syndicates, trusts or pools. Those unregulated pools were instrumental in delivering the 1929 Crash….There is growing evidence that today’s pools—hedge funds—have advanced and refined the practice of manipulating and cheating other market participants.”

Aguirre then described the investigation that he had led at the SEC. “The investigation was two-pronged,” he wrote. One prong concerned “insider trading.” However, the second, and far more important prong, concerned “market manipulation.” Specifically, Aguirre and his colleagues were investigating “two suspected violations: wash sales and naked shorts.”

“My colleagues,” Aguirre wrote, “believed [the naked short selling] held a greater potential to severely injure the financial markets.”

That is, Aguirre and his colleagues believed that naked short selling (hedge funds selling stock that they have not yet purchased or borrowed in order to drive down prices and destroy public companies) ranked high among the tactics that “were instrumental in delivering the 1929 Crash” – a repeat of which now seemed entirely possible since the tactic had been “refined” by hedge funds intent on “manipulating and cheating other market participants.” But the SEC rank-and-file’s attempt to investigate this crime was “stopped in its tracks” by SEC leaders who had been corrupted by Wall Street fat cats.

At the time when Aguirre released his letter, a small clique of influential journalists with close ties to certain Wall Street fat cats were going to great lengths to whitewash the crime of naked short selling (see “The Story of Deep Capture” for details). Unsurprisingly, some of these journalists quickly sought to discredit the SEC whistleblower. They reported that Aguirre’s investigation concerned only the minor infraction of insider trading, and that he had failed to present evidence that this minor infraction had occurred. The journalists also declared that Aguirre was untrustworthy – an eccentric who had been fired for poor performance.

After a year long investigation into the matter, however, the Senate Judiciary Committee completely vindicated Aguirre. It noted that Aguirre had been fired just two weeks after his supervisors had raved about his “unmatched dedication” in glowing written evaluations of his performance. It presented clear evidence that Mack’s lawyers were given special access to meetings in which Aguirre’s investigation was discussed. While the SEC was busy quashing the investigation and firing Aguirre for complaining about it, Paul Berger, then the SEC associate director of enforcement, was interviewing for a job at Mack’s law firm.

The Senate investigators concluded that they were “deeply troubled” by the SEC’s failure to look into Aguirre’s claims. “At worst,” the Senate report said, “the picture is colored with overtones of a possible cover-up.”

As part of this cover-up, the SEC eventually claimed that although Aguirre had been fired, the commission had nonetheless pressed forward with its “insider trading” investigation, finding no evidence that Pequot or Mack and committed any violations. However, the SEC has yet to reveal whether its rank-and-file were allowed to complete their investigation into the naked short selling that had the greater potential to “seriously injure the financial markets.”

SEC leaders remained uninterested in the crime until this past summer. Data for June showed that “failures to deliver” (phantom stock sold by naked short sellers) had peaked at more than 2 billion shares – an all time record. More important, the SEC’s cronies on Wall Street were now victims of the very crime that they had perpetrated and covered up. An avalanche of naked short selling, timed to coincide with a false news report on CNBC, had sparked the run on the bank that took down Bear Stearns. Now, other Wall Street institutions (including, yes, Morgan Stanley) were getting similarly clobbered. In mid-July, the SEC pronounced that naked short selling had the potential to “seriously damage” the financial system. It issued an “emergency order” protecting 19 big financial institutions (including Morgan Stanley) from the crime.

That kept the big banks safe for a time. But ultimately, short-sellers proved to be more skilled at cronyism than their former accomplices at the big banks. In August, under pressure from the short seller lobby, the SEC lifted its “emergency order.” In the next three weeks, a half-dozen major financial institutions were eliminated or nationalized. Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack (no doubt regretting that he had quashed the Aguirre investigation) hollered that he was next — that law-breaking short sellers were taking down his bank. The SEC responded by banning short selling outright in 900-plus companies. Meanwhile, everyone from Hillary Clinton to John McCain implicated naked short selling in the biggest financial cataclysm since 1929.

A few weeks later the SEC inspector general issued a 191-page report vindicating Gary Aguirre. The otherwise detailed report conspicuously failed to mention the naked short selling component of Aguirre’s investigation, but it contained many of the same findings that the Senate had described. The report, compiled over many months, concluded that Mack’s interference with Aguirre’s investigation raised “serious questions about the impartiality and fairness” of the SEC. The inspector general recommended that disciplinary action be taken against Aguirre’s supervisors, including SEC Director of Enforcement Linda Thomsen.

But last Friday, having spent no more than a few days reviewing the evidence, an SEC administrative judge declared that the SEC did not mishandle the Aguirre case, and that no disciplinary action would be taken. As Bogdanich’s story in The New York Times makes clear (though in not so many words), the ruling stinks to high hell.

For one, it remains unclear why in the world an SEC judge, as opposed to an independent court, is ruling on this matter. For another, it seems that the judge, Brenda Murray, was not even acting in the capacity of a judge. Rather, she issued her not-guilty verdict in the capacity of “an individual” who was asked by the SEC executive director to evaluate the inspector general’s findings.

In other words, there is good evidence that the leaders of our nation’s market regulator are as corrupt as Banana Republic cops on the brothel beat – that they have engaged in a cover-up that might have helped rock the very foundations of the American financial system – but this evidence will be evaluated in no court. There will be no legal proceeding whatsoever. Instead, an “individual” at the SEC, as a favor to the SEC executive director, says the SEC did no wrong…and that’s it – end of story.

Really, end of story. Because, aside from Walt Bogdanich at The New York Times (a paper that won’t call an “outrage” by its proper name, and which seems incapable of printing the words “naked short selling”), no mainstream journalist seems to give a flying hoot.

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Contact Mark Mitchell at mitch0033@gmail.com

Make no mistake: what you witnessed this week was not some natural process – an economy “souring,” a bubble “bursting.” This was not the “invisible hand” at work. This was not even capitalism.

This was the premeditated, systematic destruction of market value by an elite crowd of Wall Street cronies who no doubt cackled with delight in the cleverness of their mischief-making. This was criminal behavior on an ungodly scale – the unprecedented looting of America.

Do you think I’m overstating this? Consider that the hedge funds who did this employed precisely the same tactics that precipitated the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed.

One of these tactics, as almost everybody now finally realizes, is called “naked short selling.” It involves hedge funds and their brokers selling stock that they do not possess – phantom stock – to dilute supply and drive down prices.

Often, the short-selling saboteurs engage in other shenanigans – whispering scurrilous rumors, oozing innuendo, orchestrating bogus class action lawsuits, deploying armies of Internet message boards to foment negativity, paying seedy “independent” financial research shops to publish distorted analysis, hiring thugs to harass executives and their families, conducting corporate espionage, and instructing government cronies to launch dead-end investigations.

You never heard about this from the mainstream financial media. You never heard it because the market saboteurs were writing the media’s talking points. Some reporters were merely addicts, dependent on the dealers of distortion for negative stories. Other reporters were genuinely corrupt. They thought the market machinations were good fun. “I wanna play, too,” they said. They reveled in taking down companies, and then they asked their short-selling accomplices for jobs.

Our nation’s most influential financial journalists knew that naked short selling was rife. They knew that hundreds of companies had been victimized. They had all the data and they had every reason to believe that billions of phantom shares floating around the system could not be good. But they said naked short selling never happens. They said only bad CEOs and crazy people complain about short seller crimes. They whitewashed the biggest scandal of our lifetimes, and then our markets crumbled.

It was the darkest moment in the history of American journalism.

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In July, the SEC issued an “emergency order” to prevent naked short selling from destroying the financial system. The order required short sellers of stock in 19 financial companies to actually obtain real stock before selling it.

This was hardly intrusive, but the media, copying straight from the hedge fund lobby’s script, said that the SEC should leave the short sellers alone. The emergency order had hurt “market efficiency,” the journalists wrote, though common sense would suggest that a market cannot efficiently set prices when it is bloated by phantom supply. The emergency order decreased “liquidity,” the reporters wrote, though they provided no credible data to support this claim, and failed to explain how a liquid market in phantom stock benefits anyone other than a few hedge fund billionaires.

Even worse, some reporters argued that the SEC should not crack down on naked short selling because short sellers are “vital” sources of negative information to the media. What if some of these “vital” sources are manipulating markets? Criminals, apparently, are untouchable, so long as they dish dirt to reporters. The abomination riles all the more when you know (as I do, having studied thousands of these dirt-strewn stories) that the majority of them contain insinuation, omissions, and outright falsehoods.

At any rate, the financial media convinced the SEC to let its emergency order expire. Even as the markets nosedived, journalists, including CNBC’s Charlie Gasparino, were calling the emergency order “ridiculous,” and the SEC cowered. Within a few weeks Lehman Brothers was gone, Merrill Lynch was gone, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were nationalized, and American International Group, a company with a trillion dollars in assets, was trading for a dollar a share and soliciting handouts from the Fed.

On Wednesday of this week, the SEC rushed out new rules that purported “zero tolerance” for naked short selling. According to the SEC, there would now be a “hard” close out rule, requiring hedge funds to deliver real stock within three days of selling it.

Even if the SEC were to enforce a three day settlement, it wouldn’t do much, because the manipulators work like this: A hedge fund tells his broker to sell a million shares of XYZ. The broker doesn’t have any shares, but he sells them anyway. That is phantom stock and for three days it dilutes supply, and eats away at the financial system. When settlement day comes, the broker asks a second broker to sell him a million shares of XYX. The second broker doesn’t have any shares, but he sells a million shares of XYZ (the price now much lower) to the first broker, who uses the phantom stock to settle his initial sale of phantom stock.

When the second broker has to settle, he calls the first broker…and the phantom stock shuffle continues until the falling price makes it impossible for the company to raise capital. Then it’s bankruptcy, the stock is zero, and nobody has to deliver anything.

In any case, “Oooh, weee…‘zero tolerance.’ Really scary.” For years, hedge funds have habitually violated stock delivery requirements, and the SEC has done nothing. Big words didn’t scare anybody. When the SEC announced its new rules, the hedge fund lobby cheered, the media reported the cheers, and the manipulators went hog wild.

By Thursday afternoon, it was looking like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and countless smaller banks were on death row. Call this “liquidity.” Call it “market efficiency.” Call it what you like, but it wasn’t good. The meltdown was so severe that traders on Wall Street genuinely believed that Al Queda was taking down the financial system.

More likely, it was the small clique of terrorist hedge fund managers who are most beloved by our financial media. Alas, the SEC panicked. To forestall the end of the world, it decided on Thursday night to ban all short selling of stocks in 700-plus financial companies.

It is a shame that it had to come to that. Short-selling is a legitimate practice, and lots of people do it the legal way. Proper short selling probably keeps the markets honest. If the SEC had cracked down on illegal short selling long ago, the cataclysm would have been averted.

At any rate, maybe now would be a good time for the media to take a closer look at the naked short selling scandal. Stephen Moore, who works for the Wall Street Journal editorial page, said on CNBC that naked short selling caused this week’s turmoil. Why has the Journal not published an editorial expressing outrage?

The Journal’s editorial page, the finest in the country, rightly abhors government interventions, but this is not about free markets. It is about preserving property rights – the basic capitalist tenet that people must own what they sell. It is about stopping criminals.

Aside from the Journal’s editorial page, there is a world of media that has not been compromised by short sellers – a world of good reporters who live far from Wall Street and could be covering this scandal from multiple angles. They need to do so quickly. The SEC will lift its current ban. And if it doesn’t start prosecuting people – if we don’t get a permanent, market-wide, and properly enforced rule requiring short sellers to pre-borrow real stock – then it will once again be open season for hedge fund terrorism, and where our towering financial system once stood, there will be nothing but a gaping, smoldering hole.