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 here.
