You know how when all the water finally evaporates from your dirty, clogged sink, you get to see how many roaches were really drowned in there? That's how Wall Street is now, with frauds!

Today we have three—count em, then count em again with a more honest accountant—three new mini-Madoff frauds! Well they're not all "Mini-Madoffs" because they're not all massive Ponzi schemes. But the alliteration, you can't deny. Let's take them in order of outrage:

Mark Bloom took millions from investors, lied about where he invested it, collected $1.6 million in fees, and is now insolvent!

James Nicholson told investors he was putting their money into hedge funds, and that those funds were performing well. When the Madoff scandal broke, people asked for their money back from Nicholson. The checks bounced. Now investigators think he may have vaporized up to $900 million!

Paul Greenwood and Stephen Walsh took hundreds of millions from investors and just blew it all on stupid shit like expensive teddy bears. But they wrote IOU's for all of it, okay!

But Greenwood and Walsh used "$160 million for personal expenses, including rare books at auctions, horses, Steiff teddy bears for as much as $80,000 [each] at various auctions . . . and a residence for Walsh's ex-wife, Janet Walsh, in the amount of $3 million," the Commodities Futures Trading Commission said in a civil suit. Greenwood, who was elected town supervisor of North Salem in Westchester in 2007, and his wife are believed to own the world's largest collection of rare Steiffs - 1,350 of them... Records showed that of the $812 million in assets held by their operation, $794 million were in promissory notes saying Greenwood and Walsh owned their own fund money.

Now that Wall Street is losing money and investors are all spooked and asking for their cash back, we expect more and more of these every day. It is the idle entertainment of the bitter poor! [NYP]