With unemployment hovering at nearly 25 percent in 1932, Hoover was swept out of office in a landslide, and the newly elected president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, promised Americans relief. Roosevelt had decried “the ruthless manipulation of professional gamblers and the corporate system” that allowed “a few powerful interests to make industrial cannon fodder of the lives of half the population.”  He made it plain that he would go after the “economic nobles,” and a bank panic on the day of his inauguration, in March 1933, gave him just the mandate he sought to attack the economic crisis in his “First 100 Days” campaign.  “There must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and wrongdoing,” he said.

Ferdinand Pecora was an an unlikely answer to what ailed America at the time. He was a slight, soft-spoken son of Italian immigrants, and he wore a wide-brimmed fedora and often had a cigar dangling from his lips. Forced to drop out of school in his teens because his father was injured in a work-related accident, Pecora ultimately landed a job as a law clerk and attended New York Law School, passed the New York bar and became one of just a handful of first-generation Italian lawyers in the city. In 1918, he became an assistant district attorney. Over the next decade, he built a reputation as an honest and tenacious prosecutor, shutting down more than 100 “bucket shops”—illegal brokerage houses where bets were made on the rise and fall prices of stocks and commodity futures outside of the regulated market. His introduction to the world of fraudulent financial dealings would serve him well.

It's obvious the world, and America in particular, desperately needs another Pecora commission.  But the rotten class in power will not even think of it—unless forced to.

WATCH THIS VID FROM 2009, LAYING OUT THE CASE OR ANOTHER PECORA COMMISSION.

http://ourfuture.org speaks to University of Missouri associate professor William K. Black, who was the regulator who exposed the Keating Five financial scandal in the 1980s. Black points out in this interview that top government and industry officials had ample time and ample information to prevent today's financial crisis, but chose to do nothing. Uncovering the factors that led to that fateful choice is the reason why Black supports the creation of a Pecora Commission, modeled after the 1930s investigative panel headed by Ferdinand Pecora that exposed the corrupt practices that helped fuel the Great Depression.

Just months before Hoover left office, Pecora was appointed chief counsel to the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Banking and Currency. Assigned to probe the causes of the 1929 crash, he led what became known as the “Pecora commission,” making front-page news when he called Charles Mitchell, the head of the largest bank in America, National City Bank (now Citibank), as his first witness. “Sunshine Charley” strode into the hearings with a good deal of contempt for both Pecora and his commission. Though shareholders had taken staggering losses on bank stocks, Mitchell admitted that he and his top officers had set aside millions of dollars from the bank in interest-free loans to themselves. Mitchell also revealed that despite making more than $1 million in bonuses in 1929, he had paid no taxes due to losses incurred from the sale of diminished National City stock—to his wife. Pecora revealed that National City had hidden bad loans by packaging them into securities and pawning them off to unwitting investors. By the time Mitchell’s testimony made the newspapers, he had been disgraced, his career had been ruined, and he would soon be forced into a million-dollar settlement of civil charges of tax evasion. “Mitchell,” said Senator Carter Glass of Virginia, “more than any 50 men is responsible for this stock crash.”

Cover of June 12, 1933, height of the financial crisis.

The public was just beginning to get a taste for the retribution that Pecora was dishing out. In June 1933, his image appeared on the cover of Time magazine, seated at a Senate table, a cigar in his mouth. Pecora’s hearings had coined a new phrase, “banksters” for the finance “gangsters” who had imperiled the nation’s economy, and while the bankers and financiers complained that the theatrics of the Pecora commission would destroy confidence in the U.S. banking system, Senator Burton Wheeler of Montana said, “The best way to restore confidence in our banks is to take these crooked presidents out of the banks and treat them the same as treated Al Capone.”

President Roosevelt urged Pecora to keep the heat on. If banks were worried about the hearings destroying confidence, Roosevelt said, they “should have thought of that when they did the things that are being exposed now.”  Roosevelt even suggested that Pecora call none other than the financier J.P. Morgan Jr. to testify. When Morgan arrived at the Senate Caucus Room, surrounded by hot lights, microphones and dozens of reporters, Senator Glass described the atmosphere as a “circus, and the only things lacking now are peanuts and colored lemonade.”

Morgan’s testimony lacked the drama of Mitchell’s, but Pecora was able to reveal that Morgan maintained a “preferred list” of friends of the bank (among them, former president Calvin Coolidge and Supreme Court justice Owen J. Roberts) who were offered stock at highly discounted rates. Morgan also admitted that he had paid no taxes from 1930-32 because of losses following the crash of 1929. Though he had done nothing illegal, the headlines damaged him. He privately referred to Pecora as a “dirty little wop” and said he bore “the manners of a prosecuting attorney who is trying to convict a horse thief.”

At a break in the hearings, a Ringling Bros. press agent barged into the room, accompanied by a performer named Lya Graf, just 21 inches tall. “Gangway,” the agent shouted, “the smallest lady in the world wants to meet the richest man in the world.” Before Morgan knew what was happening, the diminutive lass was perched on the tycoon’s lap, and dozens of flash bulbs popped.

“Where do you live?” Morgan asked the girl.