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George Bush told the US Securities and Exchange Commission to get its nose out of American corporations and investment banks.

He told SEC employees to dutifully do their time and that no one would complain when they left the regulator for big-time jobs at places such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers – the very businesses they had been “regulating.”

In fact, things got so bad at the SEC most people who know a thing or two about investing knew that the commission didn't know squat about enforcing US securities laws.

Between 2000 and 2006 it was gutted.

And, here is where we come to that letter.

It is one of the most extraordinary letters ever written, because the SEC so blatantly ignored its author – a prominent man who repeatedly warned the commission that Bernard Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme.

I know you don't want to believe this… because it would mean another huge fiasco that President Bush has to assign blame for rather than accepting the fact the he was the boss – the decider – when so much bad stuff happened.

But, you have to be a crappy – no make that all-time-great crappy – chief executive officer to run an outfit that ignored a virtual smoking gun of evidence that proved a society scion was engaged in a massive multi-billion fraud

But, that's just what the Bush administration and its SEC did. It ignored Harry Markopolos.

No lightweight or gadfly, Markopolos is the former investment officer with Rampart Investment Management here in Boston. He is also a genius at forensic accounting.

For the past nine years, he tried to show the SEC that Bernie Madoff was nothing more than a fraud. That Madoff's investment performance, given his stated strategy, was not merely improbable but mathematically impossible.

Finally, sick of the SEC's brush off, in 2005, Markopolos penned what should have been a devastatingly persuasive 17-page letter to the SEC.

In it, Markopolos detailed why Madoff had to be a scofflaw. In the letter, Markopolos supposed that Madoff was either a minor scumbag… but mostly likely one of the world's greatest thieves.

He presented an “unlikely” scenario in which Madoff, who acted as a broker as well as an investor, was “front-running” his brokerage customers.

In such a situation, a customer might submit an order to Madoff Securities to buy shares in I.B.M. at a certain price, for example, and Madoff Securities instantly would buy I.B.M. shares for its own portfolio ahead of the customer order. If I.B.M.'s shares rose, Madoff kept them; if they fell, he pawned them off onto the poor customer.

But, reading the 29 “red flags” in Markopolos letter, unless you work, or worked, for the SEC, it is impossible not to conclude as Markopolos did, that, “Madoff Securities is the world's largest Ponzi Scheme.”

To read the letter in its entirety, click here.