[kjmclark]

I don't get this. Rich guy rips off lots of rich people by lying and cheating them. Yet any of them with a brain should have known he was cheating or something. And the guy is completely contrite and doesn't even put up a fight.

Now look at Greenspan, Rubin, Richard Fuld, Vikram Pandit, John Thain, Allen Stanford, Rick Wagoner, etc., etc., etc. Rich guys who have made a killing by ripping all of us off for decades. Anybody with a brain can tell they've gamed the system to rob the rest of us. Yet none of them have admitted any guilt and they couldn't care less what the rest of us think.

But people are up in arms over Madoff???

[lowem]

But people are up in arms over Madoff???

Madoff is just the lightning rod that protects the House of Fraud.

[Sixstrings]

What I find interesting is the reason he pleaded guilty. You see, if he'd taken a plea bargain then he'd have to reveal where some of this money went (not all of it evaporated up the ponzi chain -- just how much Madoff made off with is a mystery).

By flat out pleading guilty (not making a deal) he doesn't have to say squat -- just go to jail, and his money is safe in whatever offshore account it's in.

But the real perplexing aspect to this is why didn't he keep his mouth shut and go to trial? He could have stayed out of jail for another, what, year at least?

I'm not a lawyer, but I'm guessing that perhaps the discovery process (depositions, etc.) would cause him more trouble than he wants. So he just pleads guilty right off the bat and nips the whole process in the bud.

So there's something pretty rotten in Denmark here. Madoff must have had a very compelling reason to plead guilty like that and willingly go straight to jail.

[SeaGypsy]

Probably for his own protection?

Could he afford proper security while trying to appear as much a victim of his own ponzi as the rest of them?

Career move?

Rape fantasies?

One can only imagine he has a lot of people who would love to nail his penis to the floor in the woodshed, set fire to it and leave him with only a candle and a rusty fishing knife

[SeaGypsy]

Probably for his own protection?

Could he afford proper security while trying to appear as much a victim of his own ponzi as the rest of them?

Career move?

Rape fantasies?

One can only imagine he has a lot of people who would love to nail his penis to the floor in the woodshed, set fire to it and leave him with only a candle and a rusty fishing knife

[SeaGypsy]

Probably for his own protection?

Could he afford proper security while trying to appear as much a victim of his own ponzi as the rest of them?

Career move?

Rape fantasies?

One can only imagine he has a lot of people who would love to nail his penis to the floor in the woodshed, set fire to it and leave him with only a candle and a rusty fishing knife

[SeaGypsy]

Probably for his own protection?

Could he afford proper security while trying to appear as much a victim of his own ponzi as the rest of them?

Career move?

Rape fantasies?

One can only imagine he has a lot of people who would love to nail his penis to the floor in the woodshed, set fire to it and leave him with only a candle and a rusty fishing knife

[SeaGypsy]

Probably for his own protection?

Could he afford proper security while trying to appear as much a victim of his own ponzi as the rest of them?

Career move?

Rape fantasies?

One can only imagine he has a lot of people who would love to nail his penis to the floor in the woodshed, set fire to it and leave him with only a candle and a rusty fishing knife

[bencole]

See you later Madoff, have fun.

[Sixstrings]

Article is too long to post much, here are some snippets:

An employee of Bernard Madoff’s legitmate brokerage operations, which were described by the fraudster in his plea agreement as being “successful and profitable,” has told The Daily Beast that they were in fact money-losers that acted as a front for his Ponzi scheme.

He said that these businesses, the proprietary and market-making arms on the 18th and 19th floors of Madoff Securities, were designed to lure investors in, especially highly placed figures in society, and to fool the SEC into thinking that he had a large and impressive galaxy of businesses. But behind the façade, these businesses were a shambles. They were excessively staffed with grossly overpaid people, and run with marked inefficiency, he said.

The employee, who did not want to be identified because of possible lawsuits or threats by victims, was a member of an elite group that designed sophisticated computer-trading programs. His identity was verified by consulting the Madoff employment roster, where he was listed.

The employee learned the salaries of his colleagues when he secretly obtained a document listing them. “A senior computer programmer would make $350,000, where in most comparable firms they would be getting $200,000 to $250,000. The customer-relations people, who just handled complaints from clients, were making six figures. There wasn’t anyone who wasn’t paid in the hundreds of thousands,” he said

The employee was part of a trading group, which was able to break a security code that he says led them to a site that was supposed to be seen only by the Madoff family. It showed the profits and losses of the legitimate businesses. Even in years when they grossed $25 to $50 million, they calculated in the outlandish costs and thus concluded that the firm barely broke even and some years lost money.

THE SECRETIVE 17TH FLOOR
The employee says he only saw the 17th floor, where the fraudulent Investment Advisory operation was located, about two times. He noticed the out-of-date computers and the old-fashioned dot-matrix printers that printed out paper with green and white stripes. The computers he saw were about 15 years old, including one system that “is not even around anymore—miles away from modern Windows technology.

Why was the messy 17th floor so antithetical to Bernie’s weird passion for neatness and uniformity? "Maybe he just didn’t care,” said the employee, “as long as they did their job. He let Frank Di Pascali run it.” Di Pascali, a longtime Madoff employee, has reportedly refused to talk to investigators. “He was a very off-putting man,” the employee said. “Rough, not very friendly. He had a thick New York accent, not a very cultured manner. When we were at one of the Montauk beach parties, his son was there and he used the word ‘Guinea’ to describe him.”

Bernie was only around about half the year, according to the employee: “The other half he spent at his houses in France, Palm Beach, wherever he and Ruth landed.”

BERNIE, ‘OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE’
“Yet take the 18th-and 19th-floors: Bernie was obsessive compulsive about the floors where the legitimate businesses were,” he said. “Everything had to be black. The computers, the tables, even the picture frames. If he saw a kid’s picture in a silver frame, for instance, he would order the offender to get a black frame. If you had a jacket over the back of your chair, he would take it off. He went down the row of windows and made sure that the slats were all at the exact same angle. You couldn’t have any paper on your desk.“

“I had these huge cheap gray headphones and Mark said to me ‘Those headphones are gray and you can’t wear them.' So he bought me these expensive pair of Bose.”

‘IT WAS GOOD TO WORK FOR BERNIE’
“We all joked that the motto of the place was that ‘it was good to work for Bernie.'

“We assumed Bernie was a billionaire and we didn’t understand why he didn’t leave his money in safe investments and just collect interest. Why did he support this lousy business? It didn't seem worth it for a billionaire.” In court, Madoff admitted that at one point he put $250 million of clients’ money into the legitimate businesses.

He looked down. "But now, I keep thinking about the 90-year-old man who lost even his house and is bagging groceries. Then I think of the fact that I may have gotten paid with his money."

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and- ... silence/1/

This stuff is right out of Hollywood!

[manu]

Soon there will be a Hollyweird movie called Mad Madoff.

[Keith_McClary]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and- ... silence/4/

You linked to page 4 (a common failing). Here is the
Full thing

[Sixstrings]

Thanks Keith.. I changed the 4 to a 1 in the url.

[IslandCrow]

The US financial watchdog mishandled a string of probes into the business of convicted fraudster Bernard Madoff, an investigation has found.

It said the Securities and Exchange Commission bungled five investigations despite many complaints over 16 years about the $65bn (£40bn) fraud.

...
SEC enforcement staff had "almost immediately caught [Madoff] in lies and misrepresentations, but failed to follow up on inconsistencies", the report said.

They had also rejected offers from whistleblowers to provide additional evidence, it added.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8235005.stm

This makes it look like the SEC is hiring some great talent - To bungle one investigation is just bad standards - it takes real foresight and dilegence and hard work to ignore the obvious from 5 investigations.

[ColossalContrarian]

The US financial watchdog mishandled a string of probes into the business of convicted fraudster Bernard Madoff, an investigation has found.

It said the Securities and Exchange Commission bungled five investigations despite many complaints over 16 years about the $65bn (£40bn) fraud.

...
SEC enforcement staff had "almost immediately caught [Madoff] in lies and misrepresentations, but failed to follow up on inconsistencies", the report said.

They had also rejected offers from whistleblowers to provide additional evidence, it added.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8235005.stm

This makes it look like the SEC is hiring some great talent - To bungle one investigation is just bad standards - it takes real foresight and dilegence and hard work to ignore the obvious from 5 investigations.

The SEC needs to be held liable for this “mistake” much like the FAA or an air traffic controller would be held liable if there were a plane crash due to the traffic controller not doing their job. Criminal charges need to be brought against the SEC, maybe they didn’t mean to make the mistake but they did and now there should be serious ramifications.

[Keith_McClary]

Former Madoff employees want more details on affair allegations(

Reuters) - Five former employees of Bernard Madoff responded on Thursday to government assertions that all but one of them and Madoff were involved "in romantic and/or sexual relationships" with each other and that Madoff himself was ensnared in a "love triangle."

In short, they want more details, according to a court document filed on Thursday.

Madoff pleaded guilty in March 2009 to running a fraud of up to $65 billion at his investment firm and is serving a 150-year prison sentence. While Madoff said he acted alone, prosecutors have since charged 13 individuals in connection with the fraud. Five of them - two women and three men - are set to go on trial in federal court in New York on October 7.

The employees are former investment advisory employees Joann Crupi and Annette Bongiorno, former operations manager Daniel Bonventre, and former computer programmers Jerome O'Hara and George Perez.

Lawyers for the employees either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment on Thursday night.

Earlier this month, prosecutors who accuse the former employees of helping Madoff execute his Ponzi scheme asked to exclude from trial evidence that all but one of them and Madoff were at various times "in romantic and/or sexual relationships with one another," and that one of the defendants was in a "love triangle" with Madoff.

On August 13, the government identified for defense lawyers the employees they said were involved in each of the relationships, according to the court document filed by defense lawyers Thursday.

But the lawyers for the five defendants demanded more details.

"We still have no information regarding the timing or duration of the relationships or the source of the information, and these facts are critical to the defendants' decision whether or not to cross examine the government's witnesses concerning the allegations," the filing said.

The defense lawyers also said there was another relationship the government had not mentioned, but they did not provide details in the filing.

"While the government identified certain relationships," Thursday's filing stated, "there is still another relationship not embraced by the government's motion and about which it presumably wishes to introduce evidence at trial."

Lawyers for the former employees outlined how details of the relationships could prove relevant at trial.

If a government witness had a relationship with someone at Madoff's firm, for example, it could influence their testimony regarding one or more of the defendants, the lawyers said.

The Manhattan U.S. Attorney's Office declined to comment.

The case is USA v. O'Hara et al, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 10-0228.

[Plantagenet]

Bernie madoff was in a love triangle with five other people?

Aren't all those people too to be having sex anyway?

[Keith_McClary]

Bernie madoff was in a love triangle with five other people?

Aren't all those people too to be having sex anyway?

Your gubmint keeps track of your affaires in its yottabyte facility in Utah:

We have HUMINT, or human intelligence gathered from agents. We have SIGINT or signals intelligence. And now we have LOVEINT or NSA analysts occasionally reading the emails of ex-lovers. It doesn’t happen a lot, the NSA told the WSJ, but often enough that there is a word for it.

The NSA only admitted this abuse to the Senate Intelligence committee a few days ago.

Nothing new here since the Eliot Spitzer incident, or much earlier, J. Edgar Hoover.

[Keith_McClary]

The Madoff settlement is an enormous win for a guilty JPMorgan LA Times Business section

-- First, JPMorgan, where Madoff kept his major bank accounts and which profited handsomely off its relationship in numerous ways, knew Madoff was crooked. Bank executives had him figured out as early as 1998 -- possibly earlier -- or 10 years before his arrest and public exposure as the mastermind of a record-breaking Ponzi scheme.
...
-- Second, it's a scandal and an affront to the principle of equal and fair justice that the federal prosecutors handling this case named no individuals as bearing criminal responsibility, and even deferred criminal prosecution of the bank itself for two years, contingent on its keeping its nose clean.

-- Third, regarding JPMorgan's public statement about the outcome of this investigation: How shall we put this politely? It resembles hay after it's been passed through the digestive system of a horse.

[Keith_McClary]

Madoff trustee sues Israeli universities, hospitals for $95m

Irving Picard, the trustee appointed to liquidate the assets of convicted Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff and return money to his victims, has filed a $95 million lawsuit against some of Israel’s largest educational and medical institutions.

Among the defendants in the suit filed Wednesday in Tel Aviv District Court are Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Weizmann Institute, the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and Sheba Medical Center, the Israeli business daily Globes reported.

Picard’s suit, which was filed through an Israeli law firm, alleges that while the institutions unknowingly benefited from stolen money gained through their investments in an Israeli foundation, the Yeshaya Horowitz Association, they have subsequently refused to return it to the victims.

In a 2010 New York suit that is still in litigation, Picard alleged that the Yeshaya Horowitz Association and others knew at the time that Madoff’s New York investment firm was perpetrating a fraud, according to Globes.

Picard’s Tel Aviv suit says the funds received by the Israeli institutions through Yeshaya Horowitz were wrongly classified as donations and grants and were in fact tainted money that was being laundered.

Globes quoted Picard’s lawsuit as saying: “This account, which was part of the Ponzi scheme operated by [Madoff], performed no securities transactions and never generated profits for the approximately $3 million initially deposited upon opening the account. Nevertheless, Yeshaya withdrew approximately $126.5 million to its bank account, distributing it to various institutes in Israel, including the Defendants. The approximately $123 million withdrawn from [Madoff’s company], used to finance Yeshaya activities and donations, were thus stolen from defrauded [Madoff] customers and unlawfully transferred to Yeshaya.”
...
Picard’s suit, according to Globes, “relies on unjust enrichment law, which states that a person or company who has received a stolen item in good faith must restore it to its legal owner when the source of the stolen item is revealed.”