In the latest episode of the afternoon soap opera “As Bank of America Turns,” the melodrama is climbing to a fever pitch. The latest plot twist: On the same day that BofA settled Securities and Exchange Commission charges involving its takeover of Merrill Lynch, New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo files civil fraud charges against two top executives the SEC did not see fit to charge, former chief executive Kenneth D. Lewis and former chief financial officer Joe Price. Denunciations flew around like coffee grounds spewing from a malfunctioning garbage disposal.

Meanwhile, former Merrill CEO John Thain gets an even more severe punishment—an embarrassing new job. He becomes CEO of the CIT Group, a bankrupt commercial lender. He'll try to turn it around for a measly base pay of $500,000 a year, which is what washroom attendants got in tips at Goldman Sachs back when he worked there.

Shouldn’t we be entertained? After all, that is the purpose of a soap opera. In this case, any consumer or small business that can’t get a loan or line of credit from the local bank—despite a multibillion-dollar taxpayer bailout of the big banks, including BofA—is supposed to be enjoying this spectacle. Finally, some measure of justice is being meted out somewhere against somebody.

The litigation surrounds BofA’s takeover of Merrill Lynch, which, the suit points out, had accumulated $16 billion in losses that were not properly disclosed at the time of the acquisition in December 2008. “That is just a fraud,” said Cuomo, in a media presentation.

Now, “fraud” is a very serious accusation. In Cuomo’s lawsuit, he uses that word or variations thereof 14 times. “Ultimately, this was an enormous fraud on taxpayers who ended up paying billions for Bank of America’s misdeeds,” says the lawsuit. What’s more, “Throughout this episode, the conduct of Bank of America, through its top management, was motivated by self-interest, greed, hubris, and a palpable sense that the normal rules of fair play did not apply to them. Bank of America's management thought of itself as too big to play by the rules and, just as disturbingly, too big to tell the truth.”

The word illegal is strewn about the lawsuit as well, sometimes used in conjunction with fraud, as in “Defendants engaged in repeated fraudulent or illegal acts or otherwise demonstrated persistent fraud or illegality in the carrying on, conducting, or transaction of business.”

Now, that brings me to a question that I ask myself whenever I read an attorney general or regulatory body making allegations like this in a civil lawsuit: Aren’t they in the wrong courtroom?

I don’t mean to be picky, but when I was attending Junior High School 45 in the Bronx some years ago, we were taught in eighth grade social studies class that illegal acts such as fraud are prosecuted in criminal court. Civil disputes were for auto accidents and ruined suits; in big business I guess they would be used for big-ticket incivility, such as antitrust issues, trademark infringement, and the like.

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