Madoff: Don’t let Wall Street scam you, like I did
It seems that he is hoping for a pardon. While he was doing it the story was quite different 
Madoff’s Sons Cleared in London Trial
Of the many questions asked about Bernard L. Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, among the most frequent is whether his sons, Andrew and Mark, knew about the fraud despite their staunch insistence that they were kept in the dark.
For the first time, a judge has weighed in on this question, concluding that neither had any knowledge of their father’s scheme.
Andrew Madoff and Mark Madoff, who killed himself in 2010, were two of eight associates of Mr. Madoff who won a significant victory on Friday when a judge in London dismissed a case brought against them by the trustee seeking money for victims of the fraud.
After a six-week trial, Judge Andrew Popplewell dismissed all of the claims against Mr. Madoff’s sons, ruling that neither of them “knew of, or suspected, the fraud” and stated that “their honesty and integrity has been vindicated.”
“The decision confirms what Mark and Andrew stated from day one — that they did not know of or participate in the fraud perpetrated by their father,” said Martin Flumenbaum, a lawyer at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison who has represented the Madoff sons since their father’s arrest.
Andrew and Mark Madoff managed the legitimate market-making and proprietary-trading divisions of their father’s firm. Mark Madoff committed suicide in December 2010 on the second anniversary of his father’s arrest, only a few days after the lawsuit was filed in Britain. Neither has been criminally charged in the case.
The ruling in London comes during the same week that a criminal trial of five low-level employees of Mr. Madoff — none of whom were part of the London case — began in Federal District Court in Manhattan. Mr. Madoff, 75, is serving a 150-year sentence; nine people, including Mr. Madoff, have pleaded guilty.
From the start, lawyers for Andrew and Mark Madoff argued it was unfair for them to face the claims in a London court.
While the liquidator of Mr. Madoff’s British unit technically brought the case, the Madoff trustee in the United States, Irving H. Picard, financed the lawsuit and was the interested party. They were seeking to recover $50 million on behalf of the scheme’s victims.
“We are obviously extremely disappointed with the judgment handed down today as claims made against the defendants were serious and there was undoubtedly a case to answer,” said Amanda Remus, a spokeswoman for the trustee.
Nothing changes
People that got robbed will never get their money back - that is the sad truth about eh system we are living in
Madoff has insisted all along that J.P. Morgan knew about Ponzi scheme
“It was very obvious to the banks what was going on.”
Bernie Madoff has been insisting for five years that the banks knew and were complicit in his massive Ponzi scheme, that defrauded customers out of billions of dollars and left people devastated.
“With me, they turned a blind eye,” said Madoff in an in-person interview in early May, at a federal prison in Butner, North Carolina.
Madoff spent much of the two hours emphatically insisting the banks on Wall Street were complicit in his Ponzi scheme, but left him alone because he was a major client for them.
“This is not a matter of taking my word for it, they (the authorities) don’t have to take my word for it,” he said.
He specifically pointed fingers at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. JPM as a major culprit.
J.P. Morgan is under all kinds of regulatory scrutiny and pressure to abide by the letter of the law after the London Whale scandal and is now in a new spotlight with regulators over Madoff, reported the New York Times on Thursday.
Federal authorities are considering action in a criminal investigation against the firm on charges that it turned a blind eye to Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. The report says the bank may face a fine and other concessions in return for a suspended criminal charge.
In the May interview, Madoff insisted that J.P. Morgan got information from the Securities and Exchange Commission that would have showed financial reports didn’t match customer statements. Madoff’s firm, a private brokerage company that does business with the public, would have had to provide balance sheet information to regulators. J.P. Morgan could not be reached for a comment.
“From my first interview to the media I have said that ‘the banks must have known,’ and were complicit and contributing to my crime,” said Madoff.
Of course that they knew. They are doing the same thing (using stimulus money this tome to cover the tracks)
Madoff said JPMorgan executives knew of his fraud: lawsuit
Two senior officials at JPMorgan Chase & Co and predecessor companies repeatedly confronted Bernard Madoff over irregularities in his business, a new lawsuit said, suggesting that bank leaders had "direct knowledge" of his Ponzi scheme.
The lawsuit filed in federal court in Manhattan on Wednesday on behalf of shareholders against Chief Executive Jamie Dimon and 12 other current and former executives and directors was based in part by statements made by Madoff himself during a series of interviews.
"JPMorgan was uniquely positioned for 20 years to see Madoff's crimes and put a stop to them," the lawsuit said.
"But faced with the prospect of shutting down Madoff's account and losing lucrative profits," it added, "JPMorgan - at its highest level - chose to turn a blind eye."
JPMorgan spokeswoman Tasha Pelio declined to comment on the lawsuit, one of several seeking to hold bank officials responsible for failing to uncover the fraud before it surfaced publicly in December 2008. Madoff, 75, is serving a 150-year prison term after pleading guilty to fraud in March 2009.
TRUSTING MADOFF
The revelations came 1-1/2 months after JPMorgan agreed to pay $2.6 billion to settle lawsuits over its Madoff dealings.
Those lawsuits were brought by the U.S. government; Irving Picard, the trustee liquidating Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC; and other shareholders. Picard has estimated that Madoff customers lost $17.3 billion.
The accords included a "deferred prosecution agreement," or DPA, to resolve criminal charges, under which JPMorgan acknowledged its responsibility for failing to stop Madoff, who was an important client of the bank for two decades.
Upper management was not implicated in that agreement.
But David Rosenfeld, a lawyer who filed the new lawsuit, said "many hours" of interviews with Madoff, including in person on October 28 at the federal prison in Butner, North Carolina, suggested that top officials knew of the fraud.
"The DPA did not disclose how senior executives at JPMorgan knew that he was engaged in some kind of fraud, and that he should have been shut down years earlier," Rosenfeld, a partner at Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, said in a phone interview.
Asked if Madoff could be trusted, Rosenfeld said: "I think he can. He certainly sounded credible to us, and there is no reason for him to lie at this point. He is remorseful, and he does feel compelled now to do what he can to help his victims. The things he said are also easily verifiable."
Amanda Remus, a spokeswoman for Picard, declined to comment. James Margolin, a spokesman for U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in Manhattan, declined to comment.
Madoff employee trial nears the end
After more than five grueling months, the trial of five ex-Madoff employees is nearing its conclusion.
The case of Dan Bonventre, Joann Crupi, Annette Bongiorno, George Perez and Jerome O'Hara is expected to go to jury Friday at a federal district court in New York. They're accused of helping Bernard Madoff steal $20 billion from thousands of investors with his long-running Ponzi scheme. The charges they face include conspiracy to commit securities fraud.
All the defendants have pleaded not guilty. They say they didn't know that Madoff's firm was a front for a pyramid-style scheme, despite working there for many years.
Prosecutor Randall Jackson slammed that claim on Thursday, saying the defendants were willing participants in Madoff's fraud. He dismissed the notion that the employees knew nothing about the malfeasance as "an absurdity."
Jackson drew a comparison between the willingness of Madoff employees to turn a blind eye to the fraud and children pretending to believe in Santa Claus.
"Even after kids realize there's no such thing as flying reindeer, some act like they still believe," said Jackson, "because they like getting all those presents."
But in closing arguments, Dan Bonventre's defense attorney Andrew Frisch reminded the jurors that while they're looking at the Ponzi scheme with the benefit of hindsight, Madoff employees couldn't.
"You wonder, if you had lived in Madoff's world, if you would have seen it," Frisch said. "So many people were taken in by the toxic cocktail of Bernie Madoff's stature on Wall Street."
Bonventre spent 40 years working for Madoff, and testified last month that he was as fooled by Madoff as any of the victims. He said Madoff went to great lengths to maintain his image as a magnanimous Wall Street wizard who cared about his employees.
"None of that was real," Bonventre testified. "Now I think [Madoff] was a terribly ill man. It's difficult to reconcile everything I knew about him for 40 years with everything I know now."
U.S. judge OKs JPMorgan $218 million Madoff class-action settlement
A federal judge on Friday gave final approval to JPMorgan Chase & Co's (JPM.N) $218 million settlement to resolve class-action litigation accusing the largest U.S. bank of playing a central role in the huge Ponzi scheme of former client Bernard Madoff.
U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon in Manhattan said the accord "easily meets the standards" for final approval, and provides "substantial and immediate" benefits to the swindler's former customers.
She also awarded $18 million of fees to law firms that represented the customers: Entwistle & Cappucci, and Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro.
The settlement was part of a $2.24 billion global resolution of Madoff-related matters by JPMorgan, which was Madoff's main bank for more than 20 years.
JPMorgan also agreed to pay $1.7 billion to settle civil claims by the U.S. government, and $325 million to settle claims by Irving Picard, the trustee liquidating Madoff's firm.
Picard has estimated that Madoff customers lost $17.3 billion of principal. Madoff is serving a 150-year prison term.
The cases are Hill et al v. JPMorgan Chase & Co, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 11-07961; and Shapiro et al v. JPMorgan Chase & Co et al, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 11-08331.
First they scam people, then they yell "help" to the FED, then FED prints money to give it to the banks, and now they are paying fines with that money that was printed for cases like these. Banksters at their best
Are you sure that FED did not know the whole thing all the time? :):)
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If investment looks too good to be true, it is, says Ponzi scheme architect
Securities regulators are grossly underequipped to police financial markets, hedge funds are a danger to the market, and criminals have been scamming investors since the beginning of time and are not going to stop anytime soon.
Those are just a few of the observations made by Bernard Madoff in a recent interview about whether the financial markets are fair and how retail investors can protect themselves from fraudsters like him. In the interview, he described decades of dodging scrutiny from toothless regulators and gullible customers and said retail investors are the least well-informed market participants.
After all those years of racing to remain a step ahead of the authorities, Madoff has a few ideas about how the market can be made more fair for retail investors. Among them: The Securities and Exchange Commission should be beefed up, hedge funds need to be registered and brokerages should have independent custodians.
Madoff, serving 150 years for orchestrating the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, bilked his clients of billions of dollars and fooled regulators for decades before he was caught, tried and sent to prison.
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