To make Mr Lerach’s fine and sentence “fair” — at nearly 20 months incarceration in Lompoc and elsewhere in Federal Correctional Institute — well then, we had ought to really take a hard look at what fines and jail terms should be assessed to people like Angelo Mozilo (ex CountryWide CEO), Charles Prince (ex CitiGroup CEO) John Thain of Merrill Lynch, Mr Cassano of AIG-FP, and numerous other members of the banking and “shadow banking” system who conspired to defraud Americans of huge amounts of their pension savings, of their stock holdings (in many cases retirement-based), and worse.

The harms and damage done by the orgy of looting, through deception, fraud, and derivatives, perpetuated by white collar Wall Street criminals — from predatory lending to securitization to naked credit default swaps — had yet to be measured. The devastation of pension funds is a giant shoe which is going to drop, and drop, and drop on America’s retirees. Re-examined in the this sort of light, I think our DoJ, which outdid itself for 7 odd years in prosecuting Mr Lerach, should have its hand full for a few more centuries prosecuting the legion of blatant criminality by the Mozilos and Princes out there.

What fines, what restitution, what jail sentence should be handed done for those acts? If Mr Lerach’s admitted wrongdoings merit $7.75 million and loss of nearly two years of liberty, I shudder to think what our Wall Street criminals — most as of yet still at large – ought receive.

Curiously enough, some of the class action lawsuits Mr Lerach helped prosecute were against some of those same corporate criminals named above, and it’s worth pointing out that the period where Mr Lerach was “on the sidelines” (that is, in prison) coincided with the era of most rampant and blatant fraud and criminality on Wall Street and in the markets — as if the corporate malefactors, seeing Mr Lerach indicted and sent up to Lompoc, knew there was no cop on the beat, and it was safe to run amok again.

For the harm that he caused, Mr Lerach deserves admonishment, and has paid a price. Maybe it’s time to focus on those in the financial and corporate sector who as of yet have not be called to account.

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”

Theodore Roosevelt
26th president of US (1858 – 1919)