Dumbest of This Week's 5 Dumbest: New York Times Pay-Wall Woes

With over 23% of the votes, former Qwest Communications (Q) CEO Joseph Nacchio filing suit against his own lawyers was deemed the second dumbest thing on Wall Street.

Nacchio is currently serving a 70-month sentence for selling $52 million worth of stock based on insider information. He is suing his former defense team at Roseland, N.J.-based Stern & Kilcullen.

The former Qwest CEO alleges that among the $25 million in billings from his former legal team, he footed the bill for tens of thousands of dollars in breakfasts, in-room movie rentals charged to hotel room bills, and yes, attorney underwear purchases, according to a court complaint made by Nacchio in state Superior Court in Newark, N.J., and reviewed this week by Bloomberg.

Howard Stern's suit against his employer, Sirius XM (SIRI) came in third with more than 17% of the vote.

Stern filed suit against Sirius for allegedly failing to pay stock awards it owed the shock jock in exchange for helping the satellite radio company surpass its subscriber growth target. At the end of December 2010, the company had 20.2 million total subscribers, the highest number of net subscribers in its history. Stern, naturally, believes he played a not-so-small part in making that happen.

One Twelve, Stern's production company, and his agent, Don Buchwald, claim Sirius didn't adhere to its five-year compensation agreement. According to the suit, Sirius gave Stern his initial bonus stock award of 34.4 million shares, then valued at $225.8 million, after he signed on in January 2006, but has failed to do so over the past four years. The self-professed "King of All Media" is claiming that he should have received a new stock award each year.

"Pursuant to our October 2004 agreement with Stern, we agreed to deliver these shares in December 2010, or earlier if as of the end of any fiscal year we exceeded agreed upon subscriber targets," Sirius said in a document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Jan. 5, 2006.

The addiction of banks to dividends came in fourth with nearly 16% of the vote. Banks are scrambling to return to a dysfunctional lifestyle that landed them on skid row: The life-shortening and ever-increasing dividend.

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