On Wall Street, his name is legendary. With money he had made as a lifeguard on the beaches of Long Island, he built a trading powerhouse that had prospered for more than four decades. At age 70, he had become an influential spokesman for the traders who are the hidden gears of the marketplace.
But on Thursday morning, this consummate trader, Bernard L. Madoff, was arrested at his Manhattan home by federal agents who accused him of running a multibillion-dollar fraud scheme — perhaps the largest in Wall Street’s history.
Regulators have not yet verified the scale of the fraud. But the criminal complaint filed against Mr. Madoff on Thursday in federal court in Manhattan reports that he estimated the losses at $50 billion. “We are alleging a massive fraud — both in terms of scope and duration,” said Linda Chatman Thomsen, director of the enforcement division at the Securities and Exchange Commission. “We are moving quickly and decisively to stop the fraud and protect remaining assets for investors.”
Andrew M. Calamari, an associate director for enforcement in the S.E.C.’s regional office in New York, said the case involved “a stunning fraud that appears to be of epic proportions.”
Emphasis added by me.
I was waiting for this story to pop with a write-up that would concisely summarize the point. Here it is:
But the essential drama is a personal one — one laid out in the dry language of a criminal complaint by Lev L. Dassin, the acting United States attorney in Manhattan, and a regulatory lawsuit filed by the S.E.C. According to those documents, the first alarm bells rang at the firm on Tuesday, when Mr. Madoff told a senior executive he wanted to pay his employees their annual bonuses in December, two months early.
Just days earlier, Mr. Madoff had told another senior executive he was struggling to raise cash to cover about $7 billion in requested withdrawals from his clients, and he had appeared “to have been under great stress in the prior weeks,” according to the S.E.C. complaint.
So on Wednesday, the senior executive visited Mr. Madoff’s office, maintained on a separate floor with records kept under lock and key, and asked for an explanation.
Instead, Mr. Madoff invited the two executives to his Manhattan apartment that evening. When they joined him there, he told them that his money-management business was “all just one big lie” and “basically, a giant Ponzi scheme.”
The senior employees understood him to be saying that he had for years been paying returns to certain investors out of the cash received from other investors.
Emphasis added by me.
I don't give a shit that he's 70.
He wagged his dick in contempt of everybody for decades.
Flay the bastard to death in public.
How many others are out there just like him that we don't yet know about?
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