America's two most perversely influential businessmen, Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling of Enron infamy, at long last got their comeuppance last week when they were convicted of crimes that could send them to prison for, say, a quarter-century of slow, hard time. The slower and harder the better.

It took more than four years of concentrated work for federal prosecutors to win this measure of justice against two men whose greed and arrogance proved more damaging to more people than all of the crimes ever committed by your run-of-the mill Mafia don. The Lay-Skilling toll: Investors lost $60 billion, including $2.1 billion in wiped-out pensions, and 5,600 people lost their jobs. John Gotti was a piker by comparison.

Right to the end, Lay and Skilling were polished, tailored liars, asserting even that they were the victims of a witch hunt, beset by a frenzied mob that turned on corporate America because the high-flying stock market began to crash five years ago. No one bought it then, and the jury didn't buy it for the simple reason that Lay and Skilling were shot through with criminality.

There was hardly a securities law that escaped breaking at Enron on their watch, as the company, abetted by respected Wall Street names, committed intricate accounting shams, and Lay and Skilling grabbed for every dollar in cheap personal schemes. And, as the extent of the thievery emerged, America began to wake up to the fact that crime in the suites had become epidemic.

Enron begat Tyco begat WorldCom begat ImClone begat Adelphia begat Martha Stewart — all of the scandals sending top executives to prison. The country also discovered that federal regulators had largely been asleep and that conflicts of interest were rife in top-drawer investment houses. It was ugly.

Congress responded by passing overly broad corporate reform legislation, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer stepped to the fore as Wall Street's policeman (and likely into the governor's mansion), and the last of the big crooks are now being packed off to prison. Case closed. Era ended. Uh-uh. Not so fast.

While the conviction of Lay and Skilling sends a welcome message that thieves at the top will be held to account, there are those who continue to fudge and finagle as if they were entitled to do as they please if it fattens their obese paychecks. Just last week, Fannie Mae, the biggest, most important outfit you've never heard of, was fined $400 million for $11 billion worth of accounting shenanigans that had the effect of making company executives very, very rich. Fannie Mae holds or guarantees a huge chunk of all the home mortgages in the U.S., and an Enron-like failure would wreck the economy.

Although no criminality was unearthed, a 340-page federal report depicted Fannie execs as greedy, arrogant and reckless. Sound familiar? Yes. Scary, too.