The court-appointed trustee of Bernard Madoff’s defunct firm is going after the millionaire middlemen who acted as witting or unwitting accomplices to Madoff’s $65 billion Ponzi scheme.

Financier and philanthropist J. Ezra Merkin assented Tuesday to step down as manager of his hedge funds and to place them into receivership.

Stephen Friedman’s extensive contacts and expertise made him a go-to player on Wall Street. But it was precisely that web of connections that raised conflict-of-interest issues in his latest job at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

It looks like court-appointed Madoff trustee Irving Picard is going after the whole shebang: Not just Bernard Madoff’s Manhattan penthouse and home in the Hamptons, but also a good chunk of the wealth accumulated by family members.

A nephew of U.S. Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., has received millions of dollars in no-bid Pentagon contracts for his company, Murtech Inc.

Jewish philanthropist Stanley Chais was one of Bernard Madoff’s earliest investors, steering tens of millions of dollars of other people’s money to the convicted swindler.

Casting about for ways to rebuild the Republican party, a group of GOP stalwarts have sought to replicate a 10-year-old Democratic organization founded by former Clinton strategist James Carville.

Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter said today he is leaving the Republican Party and will run for re-election in 2010 as a Democrat, increasing the odds that Democrats will achieve a filibuster-proof majority.

The newspaper industry is laying off thousands, even as reporters like Steve Lopez of the Los Angeles Times are cast as heroes in new movies like The Soloist.

She calls herself a TARP wife, and offers a rare glimpse of what it’s like to be married to a Wall Street executive and former Master of the Universe who took billions in taxpayer dollars to bail out his company.

Like the man he replaced at the New York Times, Ross G. Douthat was a conservative voice in the wilderness during his undergraduate years at Harvard (’02).

In the past year, top bailout recipients including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup have dispatched dozens of former congressional staffers and ex-government officials to lobby their former bosses on the financial rescue package.

Word is that Herb Allison, a longtime Wall Street executive with ties to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, will be tapped to head the government’s $700-billion financial rescue program.

Vito Fossella, the former GOP congressman from Staten Island, NY, pleaded guilty to a drunk driving charge Monday, in a change of heart which his lawyer said was prompted in part by the drunk driving death of a Major League Baseball player last week.

Consider it a tale of two congressmen in the crosshairs.

By the time he is done with the latest chapter of his life, the ‘House that Sandy Built’ may become shorthand for Cornell Medical College, rather than now-teetering Citigroup.

The financier, philanthropist and former GMAC chairman who steered more than $2 billion of investors’ money into Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was sued Monday by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.

As Bernard Madoff used stocks to lure investors, prosecutors say Manhattan gallery owner Lawrence B. Salander used works of art.

The slate will be wiped clean for former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens. At least in the eyes of the law.

The former New York senator is working as a paid lobbyist for the World Trade Center Memorial Fund to help the group win approval for a commemorative coin to be used as a fund-raising tool.