'Wall Street does X' and 'the Mafia does X' does not in any way imply that Wall Street learned X from the Mafia - and there's no evidence in the article, either. Typical Tabibi bombast.
I suspect bid-rigging, while unethical, is pretty common behavior given this type of auction mechanic - all the buyers are knowledgeable and known to each other, while the seller is relatively ignorant and only participates in the market rarely.
You are missing the point; titling the article "The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia" is a rhetorical device used by the author to illustrate the criminal nature of what went on and draw parallels to activity that is commonly understood by the average person to be unethical. The author isn't trying to suggest that these banks literally learned this from the mafia.
"the crimes the defendants and their co-conspirators committed were virtually indistinguishable from the kind of thuggery practiced for decades by the Mafia, which has long made manipulation of public bids for things like garbage collection and construction contracts a cornerstone of its business."
Actually, as a former trader, bid rigging is a big no-no. There is a fine line, ofcourse, e.g. the IPO process's inherent factoring of IPO investors over the issuer or M&A process'a tendency to work off bankers' relationships. But this is unambiguously wrong.
Where this becomes classic Taibbi is in his implication that this is business as usual on Wall Street (it's the only place in America I know of where someone's word is worth billions of dollars, with the paperwork coming after a verbal agreement much of the time).
Sure and there are chinese walls etc but if there is the possibility of making huge amounts of money someone within the structure will attempt to subvert those controls. The question is to what extent firms seek to root out those practices or if they become part of the culture and (unofficially of course) accepted.
The current cases involving LIBOR rigging (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-23/london-banks-seen-r...) seem to mirror this article and the debate over Goldman Sachs possible collusion with hedge funds trading against CDOs in 2008 seem to point to the need to ask serious questions about how banks and investment firms conduct themselves.
If you had read the article you'd have seen the scheme relied on corrupt brokers to share bid information between buyers. This obviously suggests that without the corrupt broker, the buyers wouldn't have been able to rig the bids, despite all of them being knowledgeable and knowing each other (in so much as BofA knows of SocGen etc.).
I think the Mafia tag sticks. The brokers bribed politicians in return for being given control over shopping a municipality's bond money to the banks. They then took kickbacks from the banks to rig that bidding process. That sounds like organised crime to me.
I suspect bid-rigging, while unethical, is pretty common behavior given this type of auction mechanic - all the buyers are knowledgeable and known to each other, while the seller is relatively ignorant and only participates in the market rarely.