But the Madoff scandal only begins to touch upon the true extent of the white collar criminal activity that has plagued the securities industry under the Bush administration. As for the SEC and FINRA, they far from being incompetent agencies. In fact, they are staffed with some of the finest legal talent in the land. And, make no mistake, they are doing what the industry expects them to do which is to facilitate an environment where giant economic predators like hedge funds are free to feast on the life savings of the little investor.

As I found out the hard way, there are public corporations that have been set up for the sole purpose of fleecing investors, declaring bankruptcy and moving on to their next prey. We're not talking about little pink sheet companies. The enterprises I speak of are companies that raise hundreds of millions of dollars in our capital markets and have real products. They file quarterly statements with the SEC, hold conference calls, issue press releases, set up professional investment relations departments and receive rave reviews from consumer reports.

What distinguishes these companies from legitimate enterprises is their extraordinary culinary skills when it comes to cooking the books. The officers and directors of these scams have no problem booking phantom sales, siphoning corporate assets to off-shore entities, conjuring spectacular imaginery margins and trading illegaly in their own securities.

These swindlers have no problem shorting and naked shorting their own company's stock.
In fact, they have have a sense of entitlement to breaking every secutities rule in the book because they know they are immune from the law and have absolutely no fear that they will be subject to enforcement.

The dirty little secret on Wall Street is that the SEC, FINRA and other regulators are adamant and stubborn in their resistance to regulate. I have experienced their tenacity first hand - and it is an ugly sight to behold. You can actually take documented evidence of fraud and manipulation and put it right under their eyes and they will dodge and weave in order to avoid taking any enforcement action. They will actually assign you a case number and put on a dog and pony show to create the illusion that they will pursue the culprits and turn around and do nothing on worse.

One has to ask what the regulators get out of it. I am talking here about the individual regulator who ends up with concrete evidence of foul play by insiders and decides to do nothing. Does he make that decision based on instructions from higher ups or does he have other motives.

It seems to me that the opportunity for the corruption of staff members at the SEC and FINRA has to be addressed. If a regulator has at their disposal concrete evidence of false SEC filings with fictional numbers, they possess a very valuable commodity. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that a corrupt regulator can trade on such information or pass it on to his or her pals in the hedge fund business.

One of the biggest mistakes investors make today is the assumption that Wall Street is regulated and that the finance cops are on patrol. They are not. If the SEC was a municipal police force, their performance would make the New Orleans cops portrayed in the "Big Easy" look like the FBI.

One also has to keep in mind that many young lawyers do time at the SEC to cut their teeth and then move on to lucrative jobs in the finance industry. Doing a favor for a hedge fund today can reap the rewards of a nice salary bump when they venture out into the private sector.

For the last year, I have been deeply involved with a company called Syntax-Brillian. This time last year, you couldn't have found a bigger booster. The reason was simple - I trusted the SEC filings and believed what I heard in conference calls. That was a fatal mistake. As it turned out, that the whole racket was set up by a Taiwan criminal syndicate to fleece American investors and ship the money back to the mother ship, a Taipei conglomorate called Kolin.

Syntax-Brillian was a product of a merger between two firms, a listed firm that was on the verge of bankruptcy and a private corporation that had been set up a few years earlier. The company produced a tier-two HDTV product and marketed it under the Olevia brand name. From its birth in November, 2005, it reported for all of seven quarters. Each filing portrayed a rapid growth in sales and optimistic guidance.

Then on February 11, 2008 they announced that they were delaying reporting the numbers for their eighth quarter. They had delayed before, and investors waited for the results. To make a long story short, they never did report again. Five months later, investors woke up to a press release announcing that the company had filed an expedited bankruptcy in the Delaware courts and that their shares were worthless.

That's where I decided to step in and get involved in figuring out what happened to my life savings. I was so hyped on the company that I had put my entire portfolio in this one stock. Had it not been for the fact that I lost virtually everything, I would most likely have walked away and tried to recoup my losses in some other investment. But having lost every last dime, I had no choice but to stand and fight the swindlers who took every last dime of my retirement account.

So, I and a few other Pro Se litigants took matters into our own hands. As a result, we now have hope of recouping at least some our massive losses. I have kept a dairy of the day to day developments since fate parachuted me into the middle of a pack of wolves feasting on the carcass of Syntax-Brillian in Delaware's bankruptcy court. I and other Pro Se litigants are now fighting the good fight against a Taiwanese criminal syndicate, a predatory hedge fund out of New Haven (Silver Point), an interim-CEO from FTI who conspired to cover up the fraud and the facilitators of the entire scam, a major law firm - Greenberg Traurig.

A tale of that struggle and the unlikely odds is now chronicled in a book I have authored - "The Sheep and the Guardians - Dairy of a SEC sanctioned swindle."

This is not easy reading material but let it be a word of caution to every small investor about the perils of 'investing' in an unregulated market where the SEC and FINRA have been taken captive by hedge funds.

Electronic Copies of "The Sheep and the Guardians" can be had by emailing me at montraj@yahoo.com. Contributions are welcome via paypal but are entirely voluntary. For those of you who prefer to pay by check, I will send you my contact information. If you do decide to write a check, keep in mind that I'm broke so be as generous as you can. If you don't see the value in it - there is no need to pay. My hope is that individual investors will at least get an idea about the extent of corruption on Wall Street and try to do something about it. The integrity of our securities market is essential to the economic well being of every American. Unfortunately, the guardians who we have entrusted with safeguarding the integrity of our capital markets are complicit in promoting the outright theft of money that rightfully belongs to small investors.

At the very minimum, write your congressman and your senators. Tell them you know that they know exactly what's going on at the SEC and FINRA and that you expect them to stop ignoring the monstrous white collar crime wave that has imperiled the economic welfare of millions of Americans who play by the rules, save their money and expect due process. We don't need new securities laws - we need enforcement of the laws currently on the books. Demand action and do it now.

Mr. Amr is a I4J contributing writer.