There were many others behind the scenes who should also have been held accountable for what Milkin eventually went to jail for. For example, Tony Gebauer who had been at J.P. Morgan for over 20 years before being brought into Milkin's operation. Lazard Freres should have been crucified but skated entirely. And then there were the bluebloods at the law firms such as Sullivan and Cromwell; Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom; and Cravath, Swaine & Moore.  Taking down the Wall Street law firms is going to be the thorniest problem in dealing with finance as a criminal terrorist conspiracy.

The fact that this remains an ongoing conspiracy is seen in the fact that AIG FP's credit default swap operation was basically set up by a bunch of thugs that had worked for Milkin, centered around trader Howie Sosin.

As for the idea that many of the targets of these bastards were "declining industrial concerns" the prize-winning work of Philadelphia Inquirer reporters Donald Bartlett and James Steele (http://americawhatwentwrong.org/Barlett-and-Steele/) in the early 1990s presented a number of case studies showing how these industrial companies had actually been decimated by the "miracles" of modern finance. It had nothing to do with their being "in decline."

Finally, a challenge for anyone who doubts all this: please identify for me the period or point in time in the past century when the Anglo-American oligarchies ceased to be self-perpetuating. This question goes directly to the "agency" question of whether history is accidental, or in some fashion shaped and directed by human design,