A kangaroo court of liberal-leaning journalists and Democratic state treasurers charged and convicted former New York Stock Exchange CEO Dick Grasso with an unpardonable sin -- success.

This collection of class-envy warriors put such relentless pressure on the NYSE that Grasso was finally forced by his board to resign.

Grasso, of course, was the man whose Herculean efforts were behind the reopening of the stock exchange only four business days after the terrorist bombing of downtown New York. But the so-called titans of finance who sit on the NYSE board were so mau-maued by the media and political onslaught that they actually sided against the man who inflicted the first major blow on Osama's terrorism.

There was no scandal here. Dick Grasso accepted a big pay package endorsed on two occasions by the NYSE board in return for 35 years of successful service. What is scandalous is that key Big Board officials -- like Hank Paulson of Goldman Sachs, Philip Purcell of Morgan Stanley and William Harrison of JP Morgan Chase -- succumbed to the pressure of newspaper headlines and abandoned Grasso.

Not only did Grasso start America's economic recovery immediately after 9-11, he also saved the NYSE from a late-1990s assault by the Nasdaq. At the time, the technology stock market threatened to induce numerous Big Board companies to switch their listings, and at one point cautioned that it might even take over the NYSE. But it was the diminutive son of Italian immigrants who defended NYSE floor brokers and retail investors from a new era of impersonal electronic trading. Some thanks he got -- many of these same floor brokers helped push Grasso over the edge.

Let's be very clear about this: Grasso has done nothing wrong. Nothing, that is, except believe his own board when they offered him a large pay package for his long-term service.

Grasso did not fraudulently cook the books, steal from the corporate cookie jar, lie to federal prosecutors or engage in insider trading. He is no Worldcom Bernie Evers, Enron Kenneth Lay or Tyco Dennis Kozlowski. In fact, a Grasso-led decision to embark on full compensation disclosure as a way of hastening corporate-governance reform put him in this pickle in the first place.