We recently presented a look at some of the most notorious financial felons of contemporary times.

Since then, news has included the indictment of Mark Cuban for insider trading in a case that is somewhat reminiscent of Martha Stewart's case. According to the SEC, the billionaire entrepreneur asked his broker to sell all his shares of Mamma.com after the company's CEO confidentially told him of an impending stock offering that would dilute the value of all existing shares. By selling before the information became public, Cuban is said to have sidestepped losses of more than $750,000. Cuban insists, though, that no agreement existed to keep the information confidential.

And then there was the indictment in Texas of Vice President Dick Cheney, along with former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and others. There seems to be a conflict of interest between the vice president's influence on the federal agency that oversees federal immigration detention centers and his substantial holdings in Vanguard Group, which invests in private prison companies. But does the lame-duck county district attorney, who was a no-show in court, have the authority to bring charges against federal officials with regard to federally run institutions?

This post is part of a feature in which we wonder whatever happened to some notorious financial felons. See all 17.

I sometimes get the impression that people think I'm joking when I say I love Martha Stewart. I get it; I don't look like I have much in common with Martha. My apartment is cluttered, my cleaning habits are slapdash at best, and my hair is generally unkempt. I have at least a week's worth of random garbage traveling with me in the Hyundai at all times -- and I often get the distinct impression that people from New England are looking down on me.

Despite our differences, Martha is a personal hero of mine. Flipping through her magazine, Martha Stewart Living, is not unlike paging through a National Geographic. It's a glossy, impeccably photographed glimpse into an exotic world that I can only hope one day to visit. If the July 2007 issue can be believed, Martha is the type of woman who, on a whim, jaunts out to East Hampton for a weekend of kayaking and antiquing. In between horseback rides and hikes, she just might whip up some pasta with salted pressed fish roe, or perhaps a nice avocado gelato. Can you imagine?

So you can appreciate my shock upon discovering that Martha, this creature of uncommon refinement, might also be a common white-collar criminal. On December 27, 2001, Stewart dumped 3,928 shares of ImClone Systems (NASDAQ: IMCL) through her broker, Peter Bacanovic of Merrill Lynch. Martha -- the CEO herself of an eponymous multi-million-dollar media empire, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (NYSE: MSO) -- raked in about $288,000 from the sale. The next day, after the market closed, ImClone announced that its cancer drug Erbitux had been rejected by the Food & Drug Administration. It was an explosive bit of news that sent ImClone shares plunging.

This post is part of a feature in which he wonder whatever happened to some notorious financial felons. See all 17.

Jeffrey Skilling was the Enron CEO who tried to pin the blame for its 2001 bankruptcy on anyone but himself. He was not able to convince a jury, however. When Fortune raised questions about Enron in 2001, Skilling dismissed those "who want to throw rocks at us." And in a conference call with a hedge fund manager, Highfields Capital analyst Richard Grubman, who had shorted Enron stock, Skilling called Grubman an expletive beginning with the letter A.

Now, Skilling -- whose sentence was double that of other Enron convicts -- was serving a 24-year sentence in Waseca Federal Correctional Institution in Minnesota. Last month, Skilling was moved to a low-security prison in Littleton, Colo. The poor fellow will be about 74 years old when he is released in February 2028 -- that is, unless he gets pardoned by the current president, he wins an appeal, or he gets out early on parole.

Peter Cohan is president of Peter S. Cohan & Associates. He also teaches management at Babson College. His eighth book, You Can't Order Change: Lessons from Jim McNerney's Turnaround at Boeing, will be published by Portfolio on December 26, 2008.

This post is part of a feature in which he wonder whatever happened to some notorious financial felons. See all 17.

There was one company that I believed in during my journalism career. It was a scrappy underdog challenging the establishment and made scads of money. Back in the day, it was sure easy to root for Enron, and Andrew Fastow was one of the reasons why.

Fastow was not suave like his boss Jeffrey Skilling -- whom I met several times -- and lacked the people skills of President Bush's pal Chief Executive Ken "Kenny boy" Lay. No, Fastow was a humorless number cruncher. His importance to Enron can not be overemphasized. As Time magazine notes, "Fastow had a skill Skilling needed; he did asset 'securitization,' a means for banks to sell off risk in the form of securities backed by mortgages or other obligations."

Wow, the roots of today's financial difficulties can be traced back to Enron!

There is nothing evil. about special-purpose entities. At first, Enron's initial investors did well because the deals were straightforward. CalPERS, put $250 million into an spe called jedi i, which invested in natural gas projects. Four years late, the California State Pension Plan CalPERS got back $433 million, a 73% return over four years.

This post is part of a feature in which we wonder whatever happened to some notorious financial figures. See the other 17.

As Wall Street implodes around us, the word "hubris" is getting tossed around quite a bit. Hubris -- also known as excessive, overweening pride -- has become the catchall explanation for most of the market's ills. Our financial system has gone up in flames, we're told, simply because so many CEOs and regulators thought they were too smart to fail, no matter how highly leveraged their subprime mortgage portfolios may have been.

Assuming this is true, let's call Joseph Nacchio a trendsetter. As the chief executive of Qwest Communications International (NYSE: Q), Nacchio was determined to construct the world's biggest, best, and most totally awesome fiber-optic network. (Mind you, this was back in the late '90s, when the telecom bubble was just a glimmer in the market's eye.) However, the plucky CEO was driven not by a personal commitment to excellence, but rather by spite.

Nacchio left his old job at AT&T (NYSE: T) because he wasn't granted a plum promotion to president, which he felt he so richly deserved. What better way to show up his former employer than to build a superior network and steal away market share?

Unfortunately, Nacchio's impure motivations were not the best recipe for success. To give you some idea as to how his plans for world telecom domination played out, check out this blog entry I wrote about Qwest and Joseph Nacchio as part of our series on the worst S&P 500 stocks of the past 25 years.

This post is part of a feature in which he wonder whatever happened to some notorious financial felons. See all 17.

Unlike many of our leading financial felons, Jack Abramoff was not a trader or financier. Instead, he was primarily a political operative who managed to turn access and influence in Washington D.C. into a very profitable business. Actually, "criminal enterprise" is probably a better term, as Abramoff is currently serving a five-year prison sentence at a prison camp in Maryland.

Abramoff was a very busy guy and summarizing his misdeeds isn't easy. Highlights of his activities include bribing public officials, stealing from Native American tribes, tax evasion, wire and mail fraud, interfering with the court system in Guam, and defrauding the owners of a Florida cruise line. And then there's the allegation that he had a man killed in Florida.

Abramoff's main business was selling access to the Bush administration. His crimes reveal a lot about the legal and regulatory environment created during the Bush years, an environment that made Abramoff and so many other high-performing felons possible. His career serves as a kind of summary of all that is wrong with the Republican right -- what Bill Moyers calls the "reptilian right" that seeks power though ideological purity but only for the purpose of self-enrichment. Abramoff's power and riches were inseparable from his ties to the Republican Party, which he began serving as the chairman of the College Republican National Committee, joining a long line of operatives including the illustrious Karl Rove.

This post is part of a feature in which he wonder whatever happened to some notorious financial felons. See all 17.

I thought we'd have heard more about Charles Keating over the last few weeks of the 2008 presidential election, but much to my surprise the Obama campaign refrained from mentioning him. Keating was once the chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, the infamous bank at the center of the S&L scandal of the 1980s; that scandal featured none other than John McCain, one of the "Keating Five" group of disgraced senators and more recently the Republican Party's nominee for president. But McCain's connection to Keating didn't seem to play a role in the 2008 election, and McCain lost the race for reasons other than being connected to one of the great financial crooks in recent memory.

To be fair, Keating was not a big fan of John McCain. He reportedly called him a "wimp" behind his back, accusing him of lacking the courage to fight the regulators who sought to reign in Keating's bank. McCain, along with John Glenn, were cleared by the Senate Ethics Committee of impropriety in their relationship with Keating, though they were publicly criticized for exercising "poor judgment." McCain later said that trying to help Keating was "the worst mistake of my life," though he didn't seem too upset about riding around the Caribbean on Keating's private jet.

This post is part of a feature in which he wonder whatever happened to some notorious financial felons. See all 17.

John Rigas used Adelphia, which at one time was the fifth largest broadcasting and cable TV company, as his personal piggy bank, ultimately driving the company into bankruptcy. He founded the company with his son, Timothy Rigas, who was also charged in the scheme. The Rigases stole $100 million from the company so they could buy luxurious personal residences, trips, and other items to enable them to live a life of luxury on the purse strings of the shareholders.

In 2004, John and Timothy Rigas were found guilty of concealing $2.3 billion in loans, which were hidden in small companies left off Adelphia's books. The SEC charged them with hiding that debt and inflating Adelphia's earnings to meet Wall Street expectations between 1998 and 2002. They also were charged with falsifying company statistics and concealing blatant self-dealing with members of the Rigas family, which had a controlling interest in Adelphia. In 2005, John Rigas was sentenced to 15 years in prison and Timothy Rigas was sentenced to 20 years. At the time of the sentencing John Rigas was 80 years old and Timothy Rigas was 49 years old.

This post is part of a feature in which he wonder whatever happened to some notorious financial felons. See all 17.

Mike Milken turned the market for bonds issued by less creditworthy companies into a gold mine for himself and his firm, Drexel Burnham. As I posted, this did not end well. But in the past several years, Milken has worked hard to rehabiliate his reputation -- putting money into prostate cancer research and talking about the economy.

Who is Milken and how did he get here? Mike Milken was an academic star. He used to take the bus back and forth to classes at Wharton and came in to school before dawn with a miner's hat on his head because the bright light helped him read annual reports. Milken and I studied with the same management professor at Wharton.

That professor predicted that Milken would either make a huge amount of money or go to jail. He did both -- eventually agreeing to pay $650 million in fines and plead nolo contendere to six felonies -- three counts of stock parking and three counts of stock manipulation. Milken went to jail from March 1991 until January 1993. But that's ancient history. Where is he now?

In my 20-year career as a financial writer, there have been a number of times when I've been truly shocked by news events. This year has had more than its share -- with Lehman's bankruptcy and Merrill Lynch's forced sale and Eliot Spitzer's prostitution scandal at the top of the list.

But in 2006, probably the biggest shock was when Enron founder Ken Lay died suddenly of a heart attack. He had been convicted just six weeks earlier of 11 counts of securities fraud and related charges. At age 64, he seemed destined to spend the rest of his life behind bars. His sentencing was set for Oct 23.

But Lay died on July 5 while vacationing at Snowmass, Colorado. George H. W. Bush was among the 1,200 guests at his funeral.

Lay's detractors howled in protest. Some thought he had somehow faked his death.

Others knew instantly that this meant his conviction wouldn't stand. And, indeed it was vacated a couple of months later. The law dictates that when someone dies before using up all their available appeals, the conviction doesn't count.

According to the letter of the law, Ken Lay 'got away' with his Enron crimes. But it took his death for that to happen. And his name certainly wasn't cleared. For most Americans, Ken Lay still stands for the worst in corporate corruption and greed.

This post is part of a feature in which he wonder whatever happened to some notorious financial felons. See all 17.

How does the head of one of Archer Daniels Midland's (NYSE: ADM) fastest-growing divisions, a virtual shoo-in to be the company's next president, end up embezzling $9 million dollars while simultaneously acting as an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation? And how does the highest-level executive to turn whistleblower receive a sentence much harsher than those of his co-conspirators despite pleas for leniency and clemency from everyone from the FBI and the Justice Department to congressmen, university professors, and even a baseball hall-of-famer?

Sounds like the stuff of motion pictures, doesn't it? And that's exactly what this true story will be in September of 2009 with the release of The Informant, a Warner Brothers film directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Matt Damon as whistleblower turned felon, Mark Whitacre. The movie is based on one of several books written about the case.

When the FBI began an investigation of ADM in 1992, Whitacre admitted that he and other executives were involved in a multinational price-fixing scheme. For the next three years, he helped the FBI gather evidence. Despite that, however, Whitacre was convicted in 1998 for wire fraud, tax evasion, and money laundering. The sentence of more than 10 years in prison was considered excessive by many, given his cooperation with the investigation and the fact that he suffered from bipolar disorder (the pressure drove him to attempt suicide at one point). Whitacre served eight and half years, reportedly as a model prisoner. To this day, efforts continue to win a pardon for Whitacre.

This post is part of a feature in which he wonder whatever happened to some notorious financial felons. See all 17.

Barry Minkow was one of the youngest people to ever take a company public in the United States. He is remembered not for that feat, but for the massive financial fraud he committed via his company ZZZZ Best Co., Inc. The stock of the carpet cleaning company once had a value of $300 million, but it all came crashing down in the late 1980s.

Minkow and a few associates successfully fooled financial statement auditors into believing the company had millions of dollars of revenue each year. In reality, the revenues were 86% below what they were reported to be. Barry took over $20 million in loans from 15 banks and several individuals in furtherance of his fraud.

He was sentenced to 25 years in prison while still in his early twenties, and ultimately spent more than seven years in prison, all of it in maximum or medium security prisons. Minkow's sentence also included $26 million in restitution. While in prison, Minkow became a Christian and devoted his life to ministry.

This post is part of a feature in which we wonder whatever happened to some notorious financial felons. See all 17.

Just say it's been "a long and winding financial road" for billionaire investor George Soros -- but one that's had more smooth traveling than detours.

True, the Hungarian-born Soros was fined $2 million by a French court in 2002 for insider trading, which France's highest court upheld on an appeal on June 14, 2006, but other than that transgression, critics would be hard pressed to find other operational/financial flaws.

Soros is perhaps best known for one of the most cunning and successful short-term plays in investment fund history. On September 16, 1992 Soros sold short more than $10 billion worth of the British pound, after the Bank of England failed to raise interest rates. Soros' profit on the ensuing fall in the pound: about $1.1 billion.

Further, the other dimensions of Soros life that some critics would cite -- his social activism and philanthropy -- are viewed as positives by many others. Soros has promoted nonviolent democratization in Central and Eastern Europe, and other states, and pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to numerous universities globally and to antipoverty programs in Africa, among many other charitable acts.

This post is part of a feature in which he wonder whatever happened to some notorious financial felons. See all 17.

Back in the 1990s, Lou Pearlman was a well-know boy band mogul and talent scout, handling such talent as the BackStreet Boys and 'NSync. But in 2006 it became clear that Pearlman had perpetrated one of the biggest and longest running Ponzi schemes in American history.

It all started with a fake travel agency and grew into a complex enterprise comprised of many entities, funded by millions from banks and investors. The state of Florida, the FBI, the IRS, and the FDIC all took part in investigations. In 2007, Pearlman's attorneys filed suit to withdraw from representing him and Pearlman's assets were seized and his companies put into bankruptcy. Pearlman fled the country but was arrested after being spotted in Indonesia. He was promptly indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of bank fraud, mail fraud, and wire fraud.

With a year like that, he easily made BloggingStocks' list of Money Losers of 2007.

This post is part of a feature in which we wonder whatever happened to some notorious financial felons. See all 17.

Who better understands the roots of the current financial crisis than the man who single-handedly brought down Barings Bank back in 1995? Back then, Nicholas Leeson lost $1.4 billion in unauthorized trading and rendered Britain's oldest bank insolvent. It was eventually sold for one pound to ING, a Dutch Bank.

Leeson now lives in Ireland with his family and is CEO of Irish football club Galway United. Although he is available for speaking engagements, he's been in relative obscurity until recently when he has re-emerged to comment on today's financial crisis.

He's been pretty prescient. In a column in the U.K.'s Independent back in January, he wrote that the financial crisis would only get worse, mainly because regulators, central banks, and the investment bankers did not understand the potential market impact of the financial instruments in play.

Leeson correctly predicted both a "crisis of confidence" in leadership and that the financial crisis would "get a lot worse before it starts to get any better." Hey Nick, have we reached bottom yet?

Compared to today's bumbling financiers who threaten to bring down the entire global financial system with their ill-timed bets, Leeson seems "like a cheap date and more fun," opines one Scottish news site. Even more to his credit, that site points out, Leeson actually went to prison, serving four years in a Singapore prison.

Will any of today's financial ne'er-do-wells do time?