This takes a pair of big brass ones:
Madoff seeks to keep NYC penthouse, $62M in assets

Bernard Madoff is seeking to keep a $7 million Manhattan penthouse and an additional $62 million in assets, saying they are unrelated to the fraud that authorities say cost victims more than $50 billion.

Supposedly they are strictly his wife's assets. I don't care, she somehow benefited from his money making. They need to be stripped as well.

I think it would do a world of good in terms of the public trust if Madoff and his staff were sitting in The Tombs...

The Madoff scandal proves yet again that truth is more fantastic than any fiction. Just a year ago, any novelist or screenwriter who came up with a Manhattan financier character named Madoff who "made off" with $ 50 billion of other people's money would have been roundly denounced for creating a caricature, because no one quite like that could exist in the real world...

He's just doing what the government did with Social Security. What could go wrong?

Not a bad piece, but it's just more of what we've been hearing for weeks.

There are great angles on Madoff that have yet to be explored:

• While these investors are all very concerned about the money now, where did they think it was coming from in the good times? They were stealing from each other, after all. As the VF piece notes briefly, there were plenty of bright guys in Manhattan who understood derivatives and knew that Madoff's numbers were bogus.

• How exactly did this guy get to be a psychopath, and how did that pathology affect his years at NASDAQ? (This VF article at least tantalizes with suggestions that he inherited some of his evil.)

If you all missed the 60 Minutes interview with Harry Markopolos -- He stated that he reported that Madoff was a scammer to the SEC in 2000, 2003, 2005, and 2007. They didn't listen to him.

His job was to reverse engineer the Madoff scheme/investment so his company could compete with Madoff. He knew it didn't and couldn't work.

Why SEC missed Madoff

" ... any novelist or screenwriter who came up with a Manhattan financier character named Madoff who "made off" with $ 50 billion .. "

I like the supermodel character named Orifice. Double word bonus.

Speaking of bonus -- I went shopping through Amy's Mall to Amazon and picked up a new tech toy. You should too!

Nice piece on Madoff. One thing not mentioned is that according to reports, the feds have found no evidence of ANY trades being made in the last 13 years. Ponder that one. His sons ran the brokerage business on the floor below Bernie's ponzi operation. A lot of these so called shrewd investors who were with Bernie assumed he was doing some variation of "front running" with his brokerage business as co-conspirators. Definitely illegal but less odious than other forms of trading fraud.
Now it turns out that no trades were being made at all.
Yet every month thousands of statements went out to clients detailing individual positions.
And Bernie did all this by himself. When he wasn't shooting another 80 at the Palm Beach Country club. Sure he did.
And his sons who ran the Brokerage business were shocked, SHOCKED to find out that zero trades had been made by Dad for the last 13 years. When they ran the business that would execute the trades.
They should get a head start on building the Madoff wing at a nice Federal Prison. Dozens of people better end up in jail.
Thursday should be very interesting. Maybe Bernie has other big fish to toss under the bus.

> Nice piece on Madoff

The more I think about it, the less impressed I am. (Though I'm still glad that Amy sent us to read it.)

It's really just more of the same shit we've been reading since the story broke. A whole bunch of rich people got taken in a Ponzi; they're kind of upset about it; rich people can be deceived just like poor ones.

There are no other insights. There's certainly no sparky or even thoughtful take on the morality of the investors. Essentially no attention is given to the fact that they were making dishonest returns for many, many years, and ought to feel some shame for it.

Instead, they're just ashamed at having been taken.

Over here, we weep for them, don't we?

"they were making dishonest returns for many, many years, and ought to feel some shame for it."

So by your logic they should be celebrating now that they've been wiped out.

Brilliant.

I bet over 90% of the people who are now wiped out never came close to withdrawing their total principal. So now they should feel no "shame" as the gains were just paper gains.

Now, the people who were lucky enough to cash out, they might have a reason to feel something. Survivors guilt like. Although if they cashed out within the last 6 years, they may be in for a rude surprise. Assuming they haven't already stashed the proceeds.

> So by your logic they should be
> celebrating now that they've been
> wiped out.

Aw, buttercup, if that's what I'd meant, that's what I would've said.

> I bet over 90% of the people who
> are now wiped out never came
> close to withdrawing their total
> principal.

OF COURSE THEY DIDN'T. Of course they didn't. The VF piece doesn't make enough of this: They were making remarkably good 'returns' on that money. But one thing the VF piece does show is that their curiosity about how this unusual wealth was streaming into their lives dead-ended with the flattering presumption that they were special enough to have been admitted to an exclusive club. They, and the intermediaries who wrote their names on Madoff's clipboard, had zero concern with which sectors of the economy were giving such stellar returns.

Where did they think their investments were actually cooking up such tasty soup? Let's imagine their thoughts about this —

– Tech equity? "Maybe! I've heard about a couple of Steves who did some kind of fruit thing in a garage in Silicon Valley, and they attached some kind of rodent to it, and now it's very successful computer! So maybe Bernie has some of that!"

– Medical innovation? "Maybe! There was something in the paper about a new cure for AIDS that involved manipulating the genetic whatchamacallit of those things in the cells of our bodies. I forget the details, but it might be something like that! Y'know, DNA! That curly thing!"

– Transportation? "Maybe! Apparently there's a new electric sports car in California... I saw pictures of the showroom in People magazine, and they were doing real well! So that might be what Bernie's doing with my money! "

But none of them never asked, did they? Maybe someone somewhere was getting screwed, but like, wut-ever. Almost any other investor can look it up in the annual report, but there were two particular forces that didn't bother Bernie's clientèle: Curiosity and morality. Sean, we need to be very specific about this: Madoff's investors weren't concerned that your portfolio never did as well as Bernie's.

> if they cashed out within
> the last 6 years, they may
> be in for a rude surprise

Last I heard (two months ago), there was talk of extending the clawback period to something like ten years. It won't matter, they're almost all screwed. And unlike those of us who've suffered losses in the broader market, they were part of an indisputably criminal enterprise. The art of the grifter has been discussed here before: The mark was to want to be taken, has to believe he's the beneficiary of improbable good fortune. Madoff's clients certain were that.

Interestingly some of these people have been down this path before.
In the early 90s I came across an article in a financial magazine with dazzling photos of Carmen Dell 'Orifice in it(She may have been on the cover & the only reason I stopped to read it).
The article talks about how she had entrusted her savings to some financial planner who had wiped her out. She was supposedly having to sell some of her wonderful vintage photographs of her by the great photographers in the 50s-60s to re-coup some of her losses.
I hope that at 78 she has learned her lesson and won't be fooled a third time...