Delivering evidence: not just the mail; The FBI and state attorneys general usually get the credit for ferreting out financial fraud. But there's an elite unit that doesn't get much notice--and they work for the U.S. Postal Service.

• Author: Sweeney, Paul
• Position: Fraud - U.S. Postal Inspection Service - Adelphia Communications Corp.- John J. Rigas

Editor's note: Forensic investigations have been elevated in importance by recent corporate scandals. Writer Paul Sweeney recently visited the U.S. Postal Inspection Service to find out more about how it successfully rooted out financial fraud like that at Adelphia Corp.

Say what you will about Jay Leno, but he usually gets the story straight. When law enforcement officers of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service apprehended John J. Rigas--the 80-year-old head of Adelphia Communications Corp., who was sentenced last year to do 15 years hard time for bank fraud, securities fraud and conspiracy--the "Tonight Show" host was one of the few people who could properly identify the federal investigators.

"The cable guy," Leno joked, got arrested by the "mailman."

It's a joke that agents at the Postal Inspection Service probably chuckled over, even though they were the butt of the joke. The truth is, that's about as much recognition as the Postal Inspection Service might ever receive. Despite the fact that the national news media took a keen

interest in the Adelphia story, few recognized that the service comprised the only investigators involved in the case, which also resulted in lengthy prison sentences for Rigas's 49-year-old son, Timothy, Adelphia's CFO, and other top executives.

Most of the press misidentified the arresting agency. Time magazine credited the FBI with the arrests. And Hockey Digest, which took an interest in the case because the Rigas family owned the Buffalo Sabres, told readers that U.S. Marshals had nabbed the Adelphians. According to agency sources, however, The National Enquirer was one of the few publications to get it right.

"It's just not a flashy organization," says former postal inspector Timothy Feeney, 35, trying to explain why the service seems so poorly recognized. Now an investigator with a New York law firm, Feeney was a member of the team that not only arrested the five top Adelphia executives who were indicted, but gathered a voluminous amount of evidence for the prosecution.

That entailed conducting interviews with members of a 53-person witness list, reviewing some 10,000 exhibits (including millions of dollars worth of antiques purchased by Rigas's wife using company funds), and scanning roughly six million pages of documents.

"They work hard and get the job done," Feeney adds of his former colleagues, "but they're generally unsung in the press. Yet they do have very strong relationships with prosecutors across the country and the kind of mutual trust needed to put the bad guys behind bars."

Almost any crime that involves the mail is fair game for the service. So it is probably no surprise that the Postal Inspection Service...