That agreement violated the U.S. tax code, jeopardizing the tax-exempt status of Capital Trust’s bonds; the SEC investigated; and AIG and Capital Trust finally settled with the IRS. “The bottom line on the $220 million housing bond” for the Florida agency, Bloomberg writes, was this: “$12 million in fees to banks, insurers and advisers; $920,000 to the U.S. Treasury; and zero spent on housing.”

There are three principal deleterious effects of this sort of scheme, the IRS’ Charles Anderson tells the magazine: “The public doesn’t get the housing or health care the bond was intended for,” the U.S. Treasury is cheated to the tune of “about $100 million a year in revenue,” and the market has been saturated with these “pooled bonds,” “driving up interest rates for all municipal debt.” (Black box deals are also called “pooled deals” or “blind pools.”)

All of which damages average Americans far removed from the world of high finance, such as a shelter worker in Wisconsin or a father of a Chicago fifth-grader, who tell Bloomberg how angry and deceived they feel.

Bloomberg’s story — which is accompanied by numerous graphic boxes with a populist feel and lengthy sidebars, not to mention part two of “Duping Main Street,” entitled “The Insurance Charade” — ends where it started with Willie Williams in Pensacola, as the pastor “looks over his shoulder at the Danger sign on the barbed-wired wall ringing” Oakwood Terrace.

“You hope that something would change, that something would actually come true,” Williams says. “But it doesn’t, and it leaves you with nothing but anger. Now we’re right back in a cesspool.”

If only more business journalists could be similarly angry.

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