Categories

THE MADOFF FIVE: History’s Greatest Fraud Yields One Of The Greatest Legal Slugfests Of Our Time

When the first prison sentence was announced on December 8th, FBI agent Paul Takla spat out a breath of air in disgust. My eyes did a split-strike conversion, a Madoff trading method that the feds called a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t fiction. Prosecutors sat stunned. So did defense lawyers, including a no-longer-frowning Larry Krantz, who rejoiced to a colleague: “This judge knows justice.” And by the time it was over, with the fifth and final defendant sentenced on the 15th, a New York federal judge named Laura Taylor Swain had upended her reputation as a harsh bequeather of punishments. The clock is ticking for the Madoff Five. In just a few minutes, it will be 2015—the year that the only employees of Bernard L. Madoff who have been convicted of crimes at trial will begin serving out their prison terms. These defendants weren’t ‘masters of the universe’ who could bring a nation’s currency down with the wave of their hands; they weren’t hedge fund managers straight out of Yale or derivatives managers with multiple degrees from MIT. They were the unseen trolls of Wall Street, the workers in the underworld that is the Metropolis of finance. They are the ones who make the Street work. These five, very much that world in microcosm, were on trial for making the Madoff Ponzi scheme work. More on Forbes here.

Share This Page:
  • email
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn