Four years ago, Suzanne Webel was looking forward to retirement. The Longmont, Colo., farmer had saved enough money to cover herself when she stopped working and help pay for her two children’s college education. She had never heard the name Bernard L. Madoff. Now, the 62-year-old Ms. Webel can’t afford fertilizer for her 80-acre farm, a necessity in the arid Colorado soil. The money she set aside for her kids is gone. And the name Madoff has become all too familiar. When Mr. Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was disclosed, the money she thought she saved over the years disappeared. More in the Wall Street Journal [...]

Bernard Madoff was generous to his employees and didn’t have policies in place for corporate credit cards used by executives to pay for family vacations and thousands of dollars worth of wine, a jury was told. There wasn’t an obvious business purpose for many charges, including trips to Disney World and Las Vegas, that Madoff’s securities firm paid each month, Charlene White, whose job included running dozens of monthly reports and helping process company checks, told jurors yesterday in the trial of five former employees accused aiding Madoff’s $17 billion fraud. More on Bloomberg [...]

The FBI agent who arrested Bernard Madoff the morning of Dec. 11, 2008, told a New York jury the agency didn’t secure or “quarantine” any portion of the con man’s offices until about five days later. When the FBI changed the locks and installed security cameras on the 17th floor of the lipstick-shaped skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan where the business operated, the same measures weren’t taken with the two other floors Madoff used, Special Agent Theodore Cacioppi told the jury in the trial of five former Madoff employees accused of assisting in the fraud in which investors lost $17 billion in principal. More on Bloomberg [...]

Former Bank Medici AG chairwoman Sonja Kohn and previous directors of Bernard Madoff’s European operations don’t owe anything to the liquidators seeking to recoup losses to repay the convicted conman’s victims. Judge Andrew Popplewell dismissed a lawsuit today filed by liquidators of Madoff Securities International Ltd., based in London. They were seeking to recover about $50 million, including payments for a luxury yacht and an Aston Martin sports car. More on Bloomberg BusinessWeek [...]

Lawyers for five ex-employees of Bernard Madoff opened their defense case Thursday by symbolically trying to give the infamous Ponzi scheme mastermind the trial he never got before pleading guilty and going to prison. Responding to prosecution arguments that Madoff alone couldn’t have kept the multibillion-dollar scam running for decades, the attorneys portrayed him as a charismatic pathological liar who duped fellow Wall Street titans, government regulators and thousands of investors. More in USA Today [...]

In his order, Judge Rakoff denies the defendants’ motion to dismiss and returns the case to the Bankruptcy Court. To view the full ruling, click [...]

Five former employees of Bernard L. Madoff helped conceal his $17 billion Ponzi scheme by making fake documents to trick customers and regulators for decades, a federal prosecutor told a jury. The defendants created millions of false account statements and elaborate trading records to mislead anyone who came in contact with the company, and became rich in the process, Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Schwartz said today in his opening statement at the trial in federal court in New York. More on Bloomberg [...]