This is exactly like calling the cops to report that someone stole your drugs. But proud upper-crust Brits aren't giving up the trappings of aristocracy as quickly as that pansy Jake DeSantis.

From Reuters:

[A] compliance officer for the Banque AIG unit in London went so far as to ask UK authorities from the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) to probe whether demands to return the payments could be considered extortion, according to emails obtained by Reuters.

One British executive told Reuters that the requests to return the money constituted "blackmail," adding, "There is no moral reason to give it back."

That's cool, British AIG execs. Given the way the locals have been voicing their pique, you're going to lose that money one way or the other.

[Photo by Mariano Colantoni.]

The poll, commissioned by liberal Jewish advocacy group J Street, demonstrates just how deep Madoff's scam went when it comes to Jewish investors and charities. According to the poll, 2% of American Jews were personally swindled by Madoff, 17% know someone who was taken in, and 28% said an organization they support was affected. Somehow J Street says this adds up to 39%. Update: A J Street employee clarifies that, yes, the poll question allowed multiple responses, as some of you suggested in comments.

[Via Mondoweiss]

Vote for the scoundrel who most exemplifies the venal, self-interested, scheming, dastardly behavior that emptied out your 401k, and we will dedicate one of the three water closets at Gawker HQ to the winner and affix to the door a memorial plaque bearing his name. We'll name the Most Loathsome at noon on Friday.

Bernard Madoff
The Pope of Ponzi schemes bilked gullible investors out of $64 billion in a byzantine scam involving forged profit statements, fake trades, and a complicit auditor. The biggest fraud in the history of Wall Street.

AIG's James Haas, Douglas Poling, Jonathan Liebergall, and John Does 1 through 71
These AIG executives destroyed AIG with credit-default swaps and incompetence. We paid $170 billion for their sins; they each got $1 million-plus bonuses.

Sir Allen Stanford
The Texan billionaire and Antiguan knight has yet to be charged with a crime, but is accused of running a billion-dollar fraud through his Stanford Financial Group, which is under investigation by the FBI and SEC. Also, like Timothy Geithner, he doesn't pay his taxes, and owes the government $227 million, according to the IRS.

John Thain
The Merrill Lynch chief ran his brokerage into the ground while redecorating his office to the tune of $1.2 million with $35,000 commodes, and is under criminal investigation for allegedly rushing out $4 billion in bonuses to Merrill Lynch executives before Bank of America bought the firm and found out that it was worthless.

Jimmy Cayne
The Bear Stearns chief was busy getting high, playing bridge, and golfing while his firm went under and had to be sold to JPMorgan Chase in a Fed-brokered fire sale. The Bear Stearns collapse launched the Panic of '08.

Jim Cramer
What an asshole! He grinned and grimaced and shouted and rang bells and pressed buttons and now no one has any money, and all he had to do was go on the Daily Show and act catatonic for about 20 minutes.

Dick and Kathleen Fuld
The arrogant Lehman Bros. CEO passed up multiple chances to sell the company he destroyed, engaging Treasury Secretary Hank Pauson in a catastrophic game of chicken that ended in Lehman's bankruptcy. He reportedly got his clock cleaned by an employee when he used the company gym on the weekend after the bankruptcy, but he denies it. He recently sold his $13 million Florida estate to his wife Kathleen in an attempt to shield it from creditors. Kathleen, at least, has a healthy enough sense of shame to ask for a plain paper bag when shopping at Hermes, which she did last Christmas.

Timothy Geithner
Do something!

Hank Paulson
The erratic and unstable former Treasury Secretary calmly let Lehman go belly up, promptly announced to Congress that hell would rise up and swallow America if he didn't get $700 billion to spend on troubled assets, and then decided not to do the whole troubled asset thing and just give it to some banks. All yours, President Obama!

Alan Greenspan
He staked the future of the nation on the rantings of an insane lady who wrote dirty novels, and assured us that low interest rates and endless streams of credit would—and he scientifically proved this!—never, ever end up biting us in the ass. Then he apologized.

Marcus Schrenker
The Indiana financial consultant was accused of fraud, so he stashed a red motorcycle in a storage unit in Birmingham, Alabama, flew his private turboprop plane from Indiana to the skies over Alabama, parachuted out, injuring himself and leaving the plane to crash 200 yards from a residential neighborhood, sought out local residents for help by claiming to have been in a canoeing accident, and hid in a pup tent in a Florida campground until authorities found him after a three-day manhunt.

Robert Rubin
The architect of Clinton's economic policy made sure that complex derivatives remained unregulated and that the Glass-Steagall act was repealed, which allowed banks like Citigroup to do whatever they pleased, so that when Rubin left the government and joined Citigroup as an "adviser" Citi shareholders could lose all of their money.

Herb and Marion Sandler
The couple founded Golden West, a mortgage lender that gave enormous mortgages to unemployed grifters. The grifters didn't make their payments, but that's OK because the Sandlers sold Golden West to Wachovia for $24 billion in 2006, before anybody figured out what they were up to. Saturday Night Live threatened to kill them on the air, but then censored themselves when the Sandlers got to them.

So there you have them. Vote for the worst of the worst. Harboring particular hate for someone we left off? We'll consider write-ins from the comments.

About an hour after his colleagues got back to the newsroom after the funeral.

Which brought this response from a Postie:

UPDATE: We just got this email from Nancy Behrman, head of the PR firm in question:

Dear Hamilton,

I have just hung up the telephone with Jeremy Olshan at the New York Post apologizing for the poor judgement in sending the Braden Keil melanoma press release.

I have always had the utmost respect for Braden and my intention was certainly not to exploit this tragic loss. Rather to educate on the severity of melanoma and the importance of skin check-ups. That said, this out reach was a directive from me to my employee Jenna. I would appreciate all slaps directed to me.

Thanks,
Nancy

Cramer avoided any career-ending gaffes on the Daily Show last night — like say, "when a performing monkey pundit does it that means that it is not illegal!" — but the extended drubbing and his squishy apologetic demeanor is a reminder that his 30-year-long career — as a trader, as a dot-com entrepreneur, and now as a screaming cable personality — has been little more than a running series of scandals and contretemps, rife with evidence that the TV personality has long made a habit of using his media profile for personal enrichment. The Stewart dust-up is far from the first time Cramer has run up against allegations of ethical misconduct. Here's the tangled history:

1. Stock-Picking at SmartMoney
In 1995, Cramer mentioned four stocks as good buys in his SmartMoney column, mentioning that he had a stake in one of them. In fact, his firm Cramer & Co. owned shares in all four, including 10 percent stakes in two of them. All four stocks shot up in value after the column ran. The SEC launched an informal investigation, and Dow Jones, which owned SmartMoney, announced a new ethics policy to prevent columnists from writing about securities they own. The magazine eventually took the blame for leaving out the disclosure. Two years later, Cramer told CNN that the episode "turned my life upside down... I now mention to everybody in the press because it could happen again; I don't want it to... It was a horrible incident. I live with it every day." Lesson learned!

2. Shorting WavePhone
In 1998, while co-hosting Squawk Box, Cramer said out loud on television that, prior to interviewing the CEO of a company called WavePhone that morning, he had shorted 25,000 shares of the company because he thought it was overvalued. Later in the same show, he went after the CEO, and WavePhone's stock dropped 38 percent, making Cramer slightly richer. He later claimed that it had been "a terrible choice of words" to say, "I called my stock-loan department and said, 'Listen, I want to short 25,000 WavePhore because I think this thing is a big speculative bubble." In fact, he said, he was just curious if anyone else was shorting the company. CNBC suspended him and the SEC investigated, but found no wrongdoing.

3. Trading With the Enemy
In 2002, Nicholas Maier, who worked as a Cramer & Co. trader for five years, published a tell-all detailing Cramer's manipulation of his pals in the financial media for fast profit: Acquire exclusive intelligence on a stock, take a position on that stock, and then leak the intel to CNBC. "Jim's strategy was to put in an order to buy a stock...and then dial Maria [Bartiromo]," Maier wrote. "As soon as she announced the news on television, the stock would often jump.... We weren't just using the news, but making it. No sooner would Maria be thanking us for the help than we'd be getting a payback—a quick hit thanks to our friends at CNBC."

4. SEC Subpoeanas
In 2006, both Cramer and TheStreet.com were served with subpoenas by the SEC in an investigation into collusion between stock analysts and short-sellers. According to, um, TheStreet.com, the SEC was looking into allegations that "Gradient Analytics, an Arizona stock-research firm, published bearish research reports at the behest of a group of short-sellers, including Rocker Partners, a minority owner of TheStreet.com." The subpoenas were never enforced after the SEC backed down, but such a scheme might involve Rocker Partners ordering up some negative intel on a stock, shorting that stock, and then leaking the negative intel to their friends over at TheStreet.com, profiting nicely when the news breaks.

5. Short-Selling
Oddly enough, Cramer outlined just such a scheme in the 2006 interview with TheStreet.com cited frequently by Stewart last night. If his hedge fund was short on a stock (he used Research in Motion as an example) and needed it to go down, he said, "it's really important to get the Pisani's of the world"—that would be CNBC's Bob Pisani—"talking about it as if there's something wrong with RIM. Then you call the bozo at the Journal who's a reporter on Research in Motion and you would feed that Palm's got a killer that it's going to give away." It works with Apple, too: "Apple, it's very important to spread the rumor that both Verizon and AT&T have decided don't like the phone, and that it's not going to be ready for MacWorld. And this is a very easy one to do because the people who write about Apple want that story, and you can claim that it's credible because you spoke to someone at Apple, because Apple doesn't talk."

Sounds familiar!

Al Sharpton and Gov. David Paterson are criticizing Delonas' cartoon today, but Post editor Col Allan is backing up his favorite artiste, issuing this statement:

The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washington's efforts to revive the economy. Again, Al Sharpton reveals himself as nothing more than a publicity opportunist.

Way to stay in character, Col. Unfortunately, we couldn't find Delonas' classic depiction of mayoral candidate Freddy Ferer "on his knees, kissing the rear end of a grotesquely obese Al Sharpton" anywhere online. [Update: A tipster mailed it in and we've added it below] But you can enjoy these blasts from the past. [Have more Delonas favorites? Email us!]

That pregnant transgender man—what are docs supposed to do with this freak? (This one was so clever he drew it twice)


A gay dude who married a woman—what next?


Muslim terrorists love Democrats. What else is new, huh?


Gays: Sheep fuckers.


Gays: Stereotypical prancing beacons of corruption.


Gays: They're destroying marriage, but at least they're not as bad as Liza Minnelli, who is a woman but nevertheless married David Gest, who is a prancing gay.


Women: Whores.


Gay pride? More like cross dressing freakazoids! Amirite?


Rosie O'Donnell is a fat butch lesbian. Haha.


Heather Mills has only one leg. Haha.

And Al Sharpton has a big ass. Which likes to be kissed.