In light of the pending Bernie Madoff indictment, we thought we’d revisit one of our favorite Ponzi schemes: MMM. The Mavrodi brothers, Sergei and Vyacheslav, along with third “M” Marina Muravieva, scammed their countrymen out of roughly $1.5 billion in the mid-’90s by promising investors a ridiculous 1,000% return on what would now be called "micro" investments. They were so good at promotion that by 1994, Boris Yeltsin had to issue a decree forbidding companies to advertise based on projected earnings. But while Madoff’s securities fraudulence leaves us with only sorrow, anger and debt, MMM left behind a rich cultural legacy in addition to those things. We’re talking, of course, about their TV commercials.

A few months before his instantly notorious purchase of the London Evening Standard, oligarch Alexander Lebedev had shuttered his Russian tabloid: The Moscow Correspondent. The laid-off staff of that paper still know how to wield that poison pen, though, as they have shown in a pseudo-deferential open letter to “the honorable Alexander Evgenievich.”

Didn’t want to let this one go without a raised eyebrow. A feature appeared in Sunday's New York Times about oligarch Alexander Lebedev and his plans to purchase British tabloid The Evening Standard. Nothing particularly strange or funny about that, but the editors did their best to make the piece utterly baffling. To start with, there’s the picture.