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 t

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.