Bernie Ebbers, mastermind of the greatest public company fraud and bankruptcy in history, has been sentenced to 25 years in jail.

How the mighty have fallen.

I met Bernie in his hey day, back when his net worth was soaring toward the billion dollar mark. I'd see him at Wall Street telecom conferences several times a year in the mid to late 90s.

And he was quite the figure. Sort of a tall, Canadian, mountain man, with chutzpah rivalling Ted Turner's.

Everyone pretty much knew Bernie and his CFO sidekick Scott Sullivan were playing things fast and loose. Their meteoric rise, and then fall, was always fueled by accounting gimmicks. At first, the gimmicks were probably legal, but they were still gimmicks.

He aggressively exploited merger & acquisitions accounting rules to build up an empire like a house of cards. And now it's collapsed, and Bernie's only color will soon be orange, as in the jumpsuits they wear in prison.

Despite all this, I don't find this sentence to be justice. Bernie's not a violent man, near as I can tell, and, to me, prisons should only be places where we put dangerous people.

I do think he should be stripped of basically all his assets, which should be paid out to those he damaged. Since he did far more damage than that, perhaps people like him should be in some sort of work release program...maybe even sweeping the streets around the New York Stock Exchange, with a camera following him, broadcast on a cable access station.

This would be a constant reminder that those who defraud us will be prosecuted. Free markets are wonderful things so long as bad actors are not cooking their books. Book cooking does as much or more damage to the others as petty stick up men, IMO.

-Robert Capozzi