Will Weinstein set off on his mission of reforming ethical practices in the business world long before anybody heard of Enron and Bernie Madoff.

The highly successful Wall Street trader and part-time Hawai'i resident said his journey began when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer about a dozen years ago.

Although he could afford the best medical treatment, the 69-year-old Weinstein said many of the cancer specialists he saw tried to steer him toward radical and costly surgery, instead of the type of treatment that best suited his condition.

"I found that people were motivated more by their background and their financial needs than what was right for me," he said.

"That changed the way I viewed the medical profession."

Cancer-free since the ordeal, Weinstein has translated his disillusionment with the medical profession into an educational cause.

He wrote an unpublished book about his experience with the medical profession and he became an expert on business ethics.

The former governor of the Midwest and American Stock Exchanges now teaches graduate business ethics course at San Francisco State University and the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.

Weinstein is in town as a guest lecturer in a series of talks featuring several local CEOs as well as leaders in the field of corporate governance, medical ethics, college athletics and corporate social responsibility.

The lectures, which kick off tonight at the UH Law School, are part of Weinstein's business ethics course, and are open to the public.

During a telephone interview last week, Weinstein said that many of the woes in today's financial markets have their roots in ethical lapses.

The subprime lending crisis is basically a problem where bankers made a massive amount of loans to unqualified borrowers to boost profits.

Rating agencies, in their search for higher fees, compromised their standards allowing the banks to repackage and sell off the subprime loans to institutional buyers who ended up taking massive hits when foreclosures soared.

"Essentially, people didn't use common sense and people went out in a greedy fashion and got us into the subprime mortgage mess," he said.

Weinstein said he believes that business ethics and profitability aren't mutually exclusive.

He said that many successful companies — Johnson & Johnson and Starbucks are two — are profitable in part because they treat their employees well and those employees, in turn, are highly productive.

Convicted swindler Bernie Madoff and former Enron executive Jeffrey Skilling made a lot of money but they can't enjoy it if they are sitting in prison or have to live the rest of their lives looking over their shoulder, he added.

"I don't care how much money you make if you're going to be in jail for the next 23 years," he said.

"With me, profit is not just the money you make minus expenses. It's also the kind of image you produce and the environment you create for your employees."

Weinstein is no stranger to the Wall Street culture that produced Madoff and Skilling.

During the 1970s, Weinstein headed the trading desk at Oppenheimer & Co. before he left New York for Ketcham, Idaho, where he started a hedge fund.

He moved to San Francisco in the early 1980s, where he served as managing partner for Montgomery Securities, a venerable West Coast investment bank. He later managed money for members of Chicago's Pritzker family who control the Hyatt Hotels empire.

Weinstein believes the accounting reforms enacted in the wake of the Enron scandal have led to a better understanding for the need for better business ethics.

Eventually, Weinstein believes that federal regulators will eventually require publicly traded companies to conduct two different types of audits: one for their finances and another for their corporate behavior.

"What it comes down to is that people want to do things right," he said.

"People want truth, and our entire financial system is based on truth."