"Main Street America has been swindled by Wall Street hucksters in pinstriped suits," Christopher Bebel, former Securities and Exchange Commission prosecutor and an attorney with Shepherd, Smith & Bebel. "It was well known on Wall Street that analysts were issuing opinions to help bring in lucrative investment business. The SEC knew this. The brokers knew this. But the average person didn't know this."

Let's follow the dirty-money trail. Wall Street's La Cosa Nostra-esque scam was remarkably intricate. As with any organized crime syndicate, there was an elaborate hierarchy of fealty at work, which tied street-corner soldiers (brokers) and wiseguys (I-bankers) to the consiglieres (CFOs) and dapper dons (CEOs). As for the Feds, in this case regulatory agencies like the SEC, "As long as share prices were going up, no one wanted to know what was going on," says Michael Wolff, media columnist and author of Burn Rate. "Nobody in the middle of a hot market wants to say the market shouldn't be hot. No one wanted to step in and be the downer." Meet the members of the Corporate Mafia, the cons who made investors an offer they couldn't refuse.

CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICERS
CONSIGLIERES
The lowdown: Behind every CEO lurks a trusted advisor, a number-cruncher who handles the logistics. CFOs cooked the books just long enough for stock prices to surge and for the dons to cash out. Take the case of WorldCom's former CEO Bernie Ebbers and his consigliere, Scott Sullivan. On the Street the wheeler-dealer pair was dubbed the Scott 'n' Bernie Show. "Sullivan was known as the guy who could make the numbers dance," says Patrick McGurn, vice president at Institutional Shareholder Services, an investor research company. "He could say whatever he wanted because CFOs could make up anything."

CON GAMES
Illegal swapping: This balance-sheet sham was popular with consiglieres for its sheer simplicity. In 2001 telecom network companies Global Crossing and 360 Networks couldn't hit sales targets, so management teamed up and swapped fiberoptic capacity. The deal showed $350 million in sales between the two, enabling Global Crossing to meet expectations. Roy Olofson, a finance department VP at Global, says that when he questioned the shady deal, he got sacked and was defamed by Global's chairman, Gary Winnick. "They buried him," says Olofson's lawyer, Paul Murphy. "That's what happens to honest guys in corporate America. It's also why no one came to his defense."

Three-card monte: You're in the market to buy a hot new ride, but you have crap credit? Don't sweat it. Get a friend to take out a loan to buy the car for you and then pay him back off the books, plus a little fee for his troubles. This way nobody knows you're on the hook. In essence that's the way it's said that Andrew Fastow, the notorious Enron CFO, managed to help hide more than $1 billion of the energy trader's debt. Bonus: Fastow allegedly dealt himself $30 million between 1997 and 2001. But U.S. prosecutors have smacked him with 78 counts of fraud, money laundering, obstruction of justice, conspiracy, and other charges. If convicted, Fastow faces up to 860 years in the can.