Chasing Madoff’s protagonist, Harry Markopolos doesn’t call himself a hero. He just says he’s a citizen “doing what your supposed to do.”

For Markopolos, that meant spending over a decade trying to get anyone and everyone to listen to his analysis of Bernie Madoff’s funds and to look at the evidence that Madoff was a fraud. Luckily, he had a trio of friends –including financial reporter Michael Ocrant who wrote the first article exposing Madoff years before the scandal broke– helping him investigate. But not even Ocrant’s story, which led to a follow-up article in Barrons was enough to get the SEC to sit up and take notice.

Rarely do lies simply go out in the world and stand on their own. To have staying power, they require a complex network of ancillary lies and human enablers (sometimes knowing, sometime unwitting) who create a web of falsehood. These tangled webs can drain families’ bank accounts, get people killed, cause great institutions to fall, even help crash an economy.

We have already heard about JPMorgan’s travails with Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. A recent report identified JPMorgan as complicit in the Madoff scheme, and potentially liable in a civil lawsuit. According to emails and documents, JPMorgan apparently knew something was amiss with Madoff’s performance figures but never reported the crime to the SEC. Some lawsuits have already been filed. In addition, JPMorgan sold certain derivatives links to Madoff’s returns, giving them a major financial incentive not to disrupt the scam, off of which they profited.

Now we’re learning about how Citi was connected to the Madoff scheme as well, from a report by the same trustee who busted JPMorgan Chase.

When the public trust is lost, the basis for our system as a whole is destroyed. Without trust in a lawful and valid financial system, the public will not take the necessary step of investing.

I don’t disagree with Adam Levitin at all about the foreclosure crisis and the deliberate backing away from any accountability for the banks. Clearly this accountability crisis is at the forefront of not only our financial meltdown and our economic malaise, but a host of other matters including civil liberties in particular.

However, without concluding that a corner has been turned or that a new era has come to Washington, let me relate a few disparate items here for you.

How do you steal $196 trillion dollars and get away with it? In Plunder, The Crime of Our Time, journalist Danny Schechter dissects the crime scene, Wall Street.