The real Eliot Ness wasn’t nearly as cool as De Palma made him out to be in The Untouchables. But no matter, Neil Barofsky was still pretty chuffed when Treasury officials likened him to the Prohibition agent. Barofsky felt like Ness during his twenty-seven months in the DC swamp, where “bullshit, ego, politics, turf, and credit” ruled the day, and only he and his SIGTARP (Special Inspector General of the Troubled Asset Relief Program) team stood between Wall Street bankers and hundreds of billions of bailout dollars.

Last year Barofsky published Bailout: How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street. The book is a memoir of sorts that aims to call attention to the “hijacking of both the bailouts and the government itself by a handful of Wall Street financial institutions and their executives.” Barofsky hopes that the American people will be as pissed off as he was when, as director of SIGTARP, he found out that Washington had been “captured by the banks.” He wants us to wake up and do something to “break our system free from the corrupting grasp of the megabanks.”

A noble objective, to be sure.