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.

The Madoffs own many homes, but Ruth recently declared their Palm Beach home to be her primary residence, for the same reason O.J. Simpson moved to Florida after slaughtering his wife and her friend—Florida law protects homes from being seized to pay off creditors or the government. Prosecutors are in the process of seizing the Madoff's $7 million New York City apartment, and they will try to go after the Palm Beach home.

Here's a picture for you. Madoff bought the house in 1994 for $3.8 million in 1994, so it's skyrocketed nearly 150 percent since them. Smart folks.

The downsides are that she will live among many of the poor Jewish couples she and her husband ruined, as well as Rush Limbaugh.

Jaffe's been subpoenaed—"investigators want to determine how much Jaffe knew of Madoff’s investment practices and whether he recklessly steered his clients to the alleged swindler."

What would Louis Boston, then, suggest wearing to the hearing? We'd suggest a tweed jacket and colorful neckery. It's always better to draw attention to the face—unless, of course, you're lying. In that case, go with snappy leather wingtips.

[Photo: New York Social Diary]

If you remember, the 86-year-old billionaire has given close to $2 billion in gifts to a charming photographer. When her daughter dared to question her mother's choices, Bettencourt announced she won't be talking to her daughter anymore and threatened to cut her out of the will.

Forbes estimated Bettencourt's net worth at $23 billion earlier this year. So whatever money she lost through her investment with Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet—remember, he's the money manager who committed a gruesome suicide in his office yesterday after losing $1.5 billion in the Ponzi scheme — won't put much of a crimp in her lifestyle.

The Oedipal twist: Madoff's own sons, Andrew and Mark, turned Madoff in after he told them that the money-management arm of his firm, which ran hedge funds for wealthy investors, was "a giant Ponzi scheme." That term gets thrown around a lot, so we'll remind you of what it actually means: A scheme in which current investors are paid outsized returns not from investing profits but from money put in by new investors.

That is, according to an FBI agent's complaint, exactly what Madoff did:

deceived investors by operating a securities business in which he traded and lost investor money, and then paid certain investors purported returns on investment with the principal received from other, different investors, which resulted in losses of approximately billions of dollars.

All goes well in this kind of scheme until the money stops flowing in. Madoff told his sons that customers had sought to withdraw $7 billion, and he did not know if he could come up with the cash.

Madoff's lawyer, Dan Horwitz, touted his client's "unblemished record" to the Wall Street Journal. But rivals on Wall Street have questioned his curiously steady returns for years.

The complaints against Madoff are shocking. But mostly for the simplicity of the alleged swindle. A Ponzi scheme, in this day and age? It show the need for better hedge-fund regulation — boring! This was a rich-on-rich crime.

The case of Marc Dreier, a lawyer recently arrested on allegations of a $380 million hedge-fund fraud, is far more compelling, with faked-up websites and multiple cell phones. Prosecutors say he tried to sell fake debt instruments to a pension fund.

It all points to a much-needed sweep of the hedge-fund world. But neither Madoff nor Dreier seem to have played a significant role in the housing bubble that could end with 8 million homes in foreclosure. Yeah, the feds got their men. But we didn't get our scapegoats.