In his own telling, Bernard Madoff was a version of the serial killer who leaves notes saying, "Stop me before I kill again." In Madoff's case, he was waiting for the Securities and Exchange Commission to ask him how he took in billions of dollars, never invested any of it and was reporting steady investment earnings. The answer, it seems, is that he had accomplices -- the Keystone Kops of the SEC who were always letting Madoff down: "I wish they caught me six years ago, eight years ago." So do others.

Madoff spoke those very words in June when he told H. David Kotz, the SEC's inspector general, how he managed to bilk some of American's savviest investors out of billions of dollars. Madoff's scheme was the essence of utter simplicity. He relied on both the...