It's so much fun to hate Bernie Madoff, isn't it?

The man shopped at some store in Palm Beach called ''Trillion,'' where sports jackets can run to $7,500. While he's been under house arrest in his Upper East Side penthouse, he has mailed Cartier and Tiffany diamonds off to his family and friends. Even his name -- Madoff, so much like ''Made Off With'' -- is tailor-made for a tabloid roasting. He has four boats, three Palm Beach places and a home in Key Largo, a big place in Long Island, a New York office and a Wall Street apartment. 

But as delish and tempting as it is, Madoff shouldn't be the poster boy -- certainly not the only poster boy -- for this financial meltdown.

Gratifyingly excessive as Madoff's conduct is, he's someone who probably actually allegedly broke the law. But it's the sharp Wall Street operators and the sinister innovators who are my candidates for Villains of the Century. They're the people who came up with financial instruments so complex that it took MIT grads to figure them out ... devices so deliberately opaque as to defy the comprehension of regulators, much less the public -- people who stretched and pushed and nudged the rules and made it seem ''all right'' because they were technically operating in that treacherous twilight zone of what's legal but not right.

There have been Ponzi schemes since, well, Charles Ponzi -- and certainly long before we'd put a name to it. Madoff's alleged $50 billion is just the new record-setter, and he may go to prison for it. We'll know where he is, and what he's doing there. It's those others -- the slick operators who may slide quietly out of sight and lie low to come back one day when the coast is clear, to fiddle the system all over again -- we should be keeping a really vigilant watch over ... even if they don't oblige our taste for titillation by dropping their diamond watches in the mail.