Google originally stated that they do NOT fight spam " hand to hand" (their words). Now though it is pobvious to a blind man that they DO intercede in the algo manually.

The algo has moved up to knocking on 150 elements, so some of those are now manual intervention. It was accepted that Traffic Power was manually removed from the SERP's, together with ALL their clients (hey I made alot of money getting them re-included so I am not complaining)

There is no doubt really in anyones mind that Google have a manual team backing up the algorithmic results. If the algo triggers something, the team go in and investigate. it is really simple.