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If only their sins weren't so banal.

Inflating revenue. Cheating on sales taxes. Penny-ante insider trading. Shredding evidence. Whatever happened to imaginative corporate crimes? Did the end of the 1980s take away the best criminal minds in the white collar world?

Not many have asked the question, because they’re still wondering what happened to executives' sense of right and wrong in the first place. There's a pat answer: they never had a moral compass in the first place.

Ok, that's a terrible exaggeration. Most people share the same failings, regardless of wealth or class. In a way, Oliver Stone's Gordon Gekko character was right: we're all greedy to some extent. Our response to that urge largely determines beneficence and malice.

A Business Week article recently asked if ethics can be taught, but the question is too broad. Can a business graduate school teach values to an adult who has none? Jeremiah the prophet couldn't change the minds of most of his listeners, so what hope could your average college professor have?

"We very much take for granted that our students have a very strong ethical and moral core," says William S. Laufer, director of the Carol and Lawrence Zicklin Center for Business Ethics Research, at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. "It's too late to engage in basic values education."

Ethics courses focus on gray areas of the behavior. For instance, do you fire a top-notch executive who didn't file taxes for a few years, but reached an agreement with the IRS that avoids criminal prosecution? A good business school helps students navigate murky situations.

But no ethics class will stop someone who doesn't care about breaking the rules or treating people badly. Professors like Laufer won't admit this overtly, but it's unlikely that periodic waves of criminal (or at least highly unethical) behavior can be eliminated.

"People find creative ways to make money, and they find creative ways to get into trouble," says Stuart Gilman, president of the Ethics Resource Center. "As many laws and rules and organic changes that the market makes, we're going to find people who are creative."

Creativity was a key trait of leading Wall Street crooks in the 1980s.

Michael Milken practically invented a new class of finance for growing companies. Ivan Boesky went after eight-figure profits with his insider deals. Robert Brennan signed up half a million suckers with First Jersey Securities, the most notorious of penny stock brokerages before the government shut it down.

Those were acts of Greed with a capital G. The material dredged up these days isn't anywhere near that league.

Look at the Enron/Andersen case, which revolves around revenue inflation and hidden expenses. Those involved may have found novel ways to skirt the rules, but the game was essentially the same one played by businesses since accounting was invented. Cooking the books is nothing new.

And the energy trading mess is probably the most far-reaching scandal of the current crop. The further you go down the list of allegations, the duller they get:

• Adelphia Cable's founding family supposedly used company accounts for personal business, but the real problem was loading the company with debt -- not a moral lapse, but just bad business.

• Sam Waksal was arrested for insider trading with the biotech company he founded, ImClone. Total value of inside trades: $10 million, or less than Milken made in a single day in 1987.

• Prosecutors' only accusation so far against Tyco ex-CEO Dennis Kozlowski revolves around evading sales tax on artwork. Even Gekko stooge Bud Fox wouldn't stoop to that level.

The charges appear even less significant when measured against major corporate malfeasance of the past.

Take Milken's junk bond machinations as an example. The dollars involved--real money that changed hands, not the double-booked sales, barter revenues and other bookkeeping fantasies involved with scandalous sums these days--was a staggering amount. In just two years Milken's employer, Drexel Burnham Lambert, paid him $846 million, or three and a half times what Kozlowski made in three years as Tyco's CEO.

Far more important than the immense personal profit was the long-term effect on the economy. Milken's ideas about high-risk debt laid the foundation for financing schemes used to fund growth companies, especially technology firms and communications providers. Junk bonds paid for most of the communications network expansions of the late 1990s; in a very real sense, many of you have access to this Web site because of Milken's financial work. You could say that his bonds paved the way for the technology bubble that ultimately consumed billions upon billions of investor dollars.

Now that’s a legacy.

What's truly depressing about the hijinks of the past several months is that they say less about the system, and more about the people who administer it. The fact that such unimaginative schemes persisted for as long as they did speaks volumes about the overseers.

Scandals of 15 years ago revealed loopholes in corporate oversight and governance. Boesky, Brennan, Milken and company found new ways to subvert the law. They taught investors something new about about securities and forced companies to think harder about corporate governance. And in the end, securities regulators and market guardians made necessary adjustments.

"The process itself works remarkably well," Gilman says. "I don't want to come across as a Pollyanna, but the market has a way of correcting itself. It's a healthy process."

But the law doesn't need healing this time. The problems of Enron, Tyco, Adelphia and ImClone occurred because of failure on the part of watchdogs, especially the accounting industry. No amount of new regulation can change the fact that this crisis wouldn't have happened were it not for auditors' fear, ineptitude or laziness. It's easy to jump the wall when the watchmen are too busy thinking about their own paychecks.

At least Gordon Gekko had to work for his money.