It would be difficult to say where the sense of pending doom was greater last month, Bear Stearns headquarters or the New York governor's mansion. Within seven days of the fabled Ides of March, the occupants of both needed to order new stationery.

The falls of Bear Sterns and Eliot Spitzer appear to have little else in common -- at least to those of us who don't subscribe to some of the conspiracy theories emanating from the Web, where Spitzer's implosion has been depicted by some as an engineering feat carefully executed by the governor's detractors to stop him from becoming an obstacle to the government's bailout of Bear Sterns.

Meanwhile, on the tube, talking heads routinely characterized Spitzer as having a yen for self-destruction rather than an ignorance of the law -- a tribute, perhaps, to the ex-governor's legal acumen.

In the end, Spitzer was tripped up not by his politics, ignorance of the law, or all-too-many yens, but by a piece of software that tracks ATM activities.

Part of a family of so-called anti-money laundering offerings, the analytics software that snagged Spitzer is commonly used to detect what law enforcement officials today call structured withdrawals, or cash withdrawals that are being made in increments rather than one lump sum. "Structuring" frequently involves multiple ATM locations; its goal, of course, is to make the transfer of larger sums of money invisible to bank examiners and others of that ilk.

"What we hear from our customers is that structured withdrawals of cash are one of the highest indicators of money laundering activity," says David Stewart, director of Financial Crimes at SAS, a software technology company that is quickly growing a practice that outfits both banks and government entities with anti-money laundering software.

"There is no question that banking systems have become much better at recognizing when a customer is making multiple cash deposits or withdrawals within 24 hours or a number of days," says Stewart, who says that technology now makes it much easier for banks to "roll up" transactions throughout the course of a given day.

The idea that Spitzer is alleged to have been making structured withdrawals would suggest that he was very much aware of the law, but at the same time ignorant of the growing analytic capabilities financial institutions have been so diligently building in recent years. In fact, some of the high-power transaction tracking capability banks enjoy today was only becoming more widely used toward the end of Spitzer's tenure as one of the country's top crime fighters.

The fact that Spitzer was snared because of alleged structuring is perhaps credible evidence that the fight against terrorism is headed in the right direction -- at least on the banking front. (Let us not forget that the 9/11 hijackers came armed with box cutters and ATM cards.) In order to comply with the U.S. Patriot Act and newly energized Bank Secrecy Act, financial institutions have steadily improved their capabilities to detect money laundering and have quickly grown the number of suspicious activity reports (SARs) that they file annually.

Back on the tube, the talking heads debated how politics may have triggered the investigation into Spitzer's alleged structuring activities.

"In only about a third of the cases does a SAR trigger an investigation," explains Stewart. "But when someone has as high a political profile as Spitzer does, this would undoubtedly tip the scales toward an investigation being initiated."

Back in mid-March, the governor had just settled down for a short winter's nap. Not a creature was stirring, not nearly a SAR in sight.