Special Report: From Hannibal Lecter to Bernie Madoff

The hope is the BAU agents, whose work in profiling serial killers has been popularized in books, movies and on TV, can get into the minds' of fraudsters and see what makes them tick.

In cinematic terms, substitute Gordon Gekko, the insider trader in "Wall Street," for Hannibal Lecter, the cannibalistic serial killer in The Silence of the Lambs, and you get an idea of what the FBI is trying to do.

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"This originally started out as an attempt to find a way to prevent and detect Ponzi schemes," said Peter Grupe, the FBI's assistant special agent in New York in charge of white collar investigations. "But it developed into something broader."

The FBI's profiling strategies are part of an aggressive new approach to financial crimes. Facing widespread criticism over the lack of criminal cases stemming from the financial crisis, the FBI and federal prosecutors are keen on showing that they are not soft on white collar offenses.

To that end, the FBI for the first time has an "embedded" agent working closely with the Securities and Exchange Commission's main office in Washington, D.C. The agent began working a year ago with the SEC's new market intelligence unit, vetting early tips the regulatory agency gets about potential scams and frauds from the public. An FBI official says there's talk of doing something similar with the SEC's all important New York regional office as well.

PROFESSIONAL CROOKS

The expanded efforts to sniff out white collar crime arise from a deep-seeded belief shared by many in law enforcement - that fraud is rife in some corners of Wall Street and corporate America. Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Baharara says his office, which is prosecuting the big insider trading case against Galleon Group co-founder Raj Rajaratnam, has found that trading by hedge funds on confidential information is "pervasive and pernicious."

Indeed, some of the FBI agents in New York assigned to investigating securities fraud openly describe some of their targets as operating like "professional criminals" - the kind of language you might expect agents to use when discussing the Mob or other organized crime syndicates.

Still, the ability of FBI profilers to make a difference is less clear to some experts. There's a good deal of skepticism about whether the techniques used to target killers who commit some of the most heinous and violent crimes is at all applicable to analyzing the motivations of Wall Street felons.

"As an academic exercise it may be interesting to put Madoff, Michael Milken, Allen Stanford and Jeff Skilling all in the same room and let the shrinks analyze them," said Marc Mukasey, the head of white collar defense practice at Bracewell & Giuliani and a former federal prosecutor. "It would be interesting to do, but I'm not sure of the utility."

After all, Mukasey and others point out that many white collar defendants have no prior criminal records and outwardly often fit the profile of a successful corporate executive or Wall Street trader: greedy, hard-charging, charismatic, ambitious, smart and Type-A control freaks.