Finra, the securities regulator that’s funded by Wall Street, got some attention last week when it said it was getting tougher on bad stockbrokers. The regulator said fines were going up and sanctions for fraud and the sale of unsuitable products were getting more onerous.

But Finra already had sanction guidelines that might have come to play in the case of Jerry A. Cicolani, Jr., a former broker who worked at Merrill Lynch and at Cleveland’s PrimeSolutions Securities Inc. Somehow, though, despite having been target of 69 customer complaints over the past 13 years, Cicolani wasn’t barred from the business until last September.

By that time, criminal authorities already were moving in with an investigation into his role in a Ponzi scheme. On May 1, he pleaded guilty to two criminal counts, including the sale of unregistered securities. He persuaded many of his former clients from Merrill and PrimeSolutions to invest in that scheme. I wrote about Cicolani in my story yesterday for The New York Times. You can read it here.