A lot, but not all, of the letters were pretty much like that. I’ll tell you what — when people get really mad, they curse!

The writers were angry, disappointed, threatening, heartbroken, crazy. It ran the gamut. My warrant was good until ten p.m., but I could have spent the whole night reading hate mail in Pilkey’s office.

After a while, I got tired of the slow walk-bys from the staff, so I closed the door and kept sorting.

The mail was from all over the country but especially from Pilkey’s home state of Kansas. There were stories about homelessness, lost life savings, families who couldn’t stay together — all types of people who had suffered in the financial downturn and placed a whole lot of the blame on K Street and Washington.

The blog entries, at least the ones that D-M tracked, were more radicalized, tending toward the political instead of the personal. One group, the Center for Public Accountability, seemed to lead the charge. They — or, for all I knew, some guy in a basement somewhere — had a regular column called “Fight the Power.” The latest entry was titled “Robbin’ the Hood: Steal from the Poor and Give to the Rich.”

Using free-market principles as their Teflon cover, the members of the Boys & Girls Club of Washington, which is to say the banking lobbyists and our very own elected officials, have crafted one blank check after another for their corporate cronies. Yes, the very people who brought this country’s economy to its knees are still being treated like royalty on Capitol Hill, and guess who’s picking up the tab? These are your tax dollars I’m talking about, your money. In my book, that’s called stealing, and it’s all happening right before our eyes.

Click here to get home addresses and phone numbers for some of DC’s most outrageous robber barons. Give them a call during dinner some night and let them know how you feel. Better yet, wait till they’re not there, then break in and help yourself to some of their hard-earned cash. See how they like it.

In some ways, the most unexpected thing in Pilkey’s office was the collection he kept of his own press about the scandal. One recent article was still in an unmarked folder on his desk. It was a New York Times op-ed.

Both Pilkey and Vinton are the subject of what will no doubt become yet another long, drawn-out investigation, proving nothing, punishing no one, and accomplishing negative gain when it comes to protecting the people who matter the most — the average joes of the world, just struggling to make ends meet.