A healthy — but admittedly lonely — Bernie Madoff told me the one thing he did right was not make his family a part of his infamous and tragic Ponzi scheme.
He looks healthy and strong for a man who is now 75 years old and will only leave prison in a coffin, since he is serving a 100-plus-year sentence. Madoff spent two hours talking with me about some of his former clients who he now says knew they were breaking the law, and he touched on his family and the role of banks like JP Morgan Chase which Madoff says were complicit in his crime. He claims to have no contact with his family and says he will, “forever live with the guilt of causing my son Mark’s death.” Four years after arriving at the Federal Correctional Complex in Butner, N.C., Madoff says he wants to help investigators recover the billions of dollars his scheme robbed from innocent investors. More on Fox Business News [...]
|
||||
|
Bernie Madoff has joined yet another rogue’s gallery, this time an actual museum gallery. In cooperation with the FBI, his victims and members of the Madoff family, the National Museum of Crime & Punishment this week opened a permanent exhibition devoted to one of the headlining villains of the Great Recession. “He is the No. 1 public enemy for financial crime,” said Janine Vaccarello, the curator of the Madoff exhibit and chief operating officer of the five-year old crime museum in Washington D.C. “He was a serial killer of the financial industry.” More on CNBC [...] Shamed US financier Bernie Madoff, serving a 150-year prison sentence, is back in the spotlight as the star of an exhibit in a US museum dedicated to gangsters and serial killers. A baseball bat engraved with the former mogul’s name, a letter in which he seeks forgiveness from his son Andrew and even keys to his old New York office are on display at Washington’s National Museum of Crime & Punishment. In total, some 15 items that once belonged to the famous fraudster or are in some way linked to him, are on view. More on Business Insider [...] The city of South Miami, Florida, defrauded investors by not disclosing problems with the tax-exempt status of two bond deals, U.S. securities regulators said on Wednesday in their second municipal bond fraud-enforcement action this month. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said the city agreed to settle the fraud charges and retain an independent consultant to oversee its municipal bond disclosures. The city settled without admitting or denying the SEC allegations. South Miami’s city manager was not immediately available to comment. The two deals at issue, so-called conduit bonds that were used to finance a mixed-use retail and parking structure, totaled $12 million and were made through the Florida Municipal Loan Council. More on Reuters [...] It was perhaps the most critical piece of evidence in the trial of Rajat K. Gupta, a former Goldman Sachs director found guilty last year of leaking the bank’s boardroom discussions to his hedge fund friend. “I heard yesterday from somebody who’s on the board of Goldman Sachs that they are going to lose $2 per share,” his friend, the money manager Raj Rajaratnam, told a colleague during an October 2008 conversation that federal investigators secretly recorded. On Tuesday, a lawyer for Mr. Gupta argued that a federal appeals court should overturn his client’s conviction and grant a new trial because the verdict was tainted by the erroneous admission of that statement and other wiretapped conversations. “The wiretaps should never have been admitted,” said Mr. Gupta’s lawyer, Seth P. Waxman, during the argument at the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan. More in the New York Times [...] Top executives of the two largest U.S. derivatives exchanges say regulators must take further steps to align Dodd-Frank Act rules with those of foreign counterparts to avoid oversight splits that could harm markets. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission and overseas agencies have a few months to improve coordination before differences hurt business, IntercontinentalExchange Inc. (ICE) Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Sprecher said in remarks for a House Agriculture Committee hearing where he will testify alongside CME Group (CME) Inc. Executive Chairman Terry Duffy. “Global financial reform efforts are not being harmonized and substantial differences remain between regulatory regimes,” Sprecher said in comments prepared for today’s hearing in Washington. “It is crucial to understand that if countries erect these barriers, we markets and market participants will be damaged.” More on Bloomberg [...] The trustee liquidating MF Global has sold a collection of the bankrupt broker’s CME Group memberships for amounts below recent selling prices, according to a list of transactions published by the exchange on Monday. Eighteen months after MF Global collapsed, Trustee James Giddens last week sold a variety of memberships owned by the firm that bestow different trading rights on the holders. The firm, which was among the top brokers at CME Group’s exchanges, made a $6.3 billion bet on European sovereign debt and went bankrupt after dipping into customer accounts to try to meet margin calls, in violation of industry rules. More on Reuters [...] Jamie Dimon and the 10 other directors of JPMorgan Chase take the stage in Tampa, Fla., on Tuesday, to face shareholders who can take comfort in a rising stock price and a prospering bank. But those same shareholders may also deliver a humbling rebuff to Mr. Dimon and the bank’s board. If shareholders vote to separate the jobs of chairman and chief executive — positions that Mr. Dimon has held since 2006 — it would signal a shift in the balance of power in corporate America, an inflection point in shareholders’ push for greater say in the boardroom. Shareholder protests at large companies are usually successful only at those that are troubled or whose stock price has disappointed. More in the New York Times [...] The Ponzi monster is now tormented by his own demons. In an interview from prison, Bernie Madoff said he’ll be forever haunted by the suicide of his oldest son, and he can’t sleep at night because he blames himself for the 2010 tragedy. “I was responsible for my son Mark’s death, and that’s very, very difficult,” he told CNNMoney in a telephone interview published online yesterday. “I live with that. I live with the remorse, the pain I caused everybody, certainly my family, and the victims.” Mark Madoff, 46, hanged himself with a dog leash inside his Soho apartment on the second anniversary of his disgraced dad’s arrest. More in the New York Post [...] Bernard Madoff once had billions of dollars, but now he makes $40 a month doing menial prison labor. “I used to work as a clerk in the commissary, and now they have me taking care of the telephone and the computer systems,” said Madoff, speaking by phone from a federal prison in North Carolina. His prison phone account didn’t have any money in it, so he had to call CNNMoney collect. As far as the computers and phones go, Madoff said he has to “make sure they’re working and they’re kept clean,” but he emphasizes that this requires no technical skill whatsoever. More on CNNMoney [...] |
||||
|
Contact us by phone at (631) 425-0770, fax at (631) 421-5701 or by email at admin@investoraction.org
|
||||