Some things just make a person aware
Sandy Hutchens was shocked! He had just read the article in the Post and was shocked.
Bernard Madoff, the financier convicted for Wall Street’s biggest investment fraud, was sitting in prison and wondering what took investigators so long to uncover his $65 billion Ponzi scheme.
Does this mean that Madoff wanted his monumental scam to be revealed earlier? If he knew that he would eventually be caught does that not mean that the con man was, in effect, conning himself? It all amounts to awareness. Awareness on the part of the con and awareness on the part of the one who is conned. Click on the link at the top on Fred Shapiro. Here is someone who was deeply involved in fraud schemes and is now lecturing audiences on the mechanisms of fraud. Yes, it is all about awareness.
The disgraced Wall Street big shot, aged 71 received 150 years’ prison time for the fraud. Madoff did express remorse and even spoke openly to a pair of lawyers suing him on behalf of investors, according to news reports of their jailhouse meeting.
San Francisco attorneys Joseph Cotchett and Nancy Fineman met with Madoff at the North Carolina prison where he was taken two weeks ago after pleading guilty.
“There were several times that I met with the SEC and thought ‘they got me,’” Madoff told Cotchett and Fineman.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is conducting an in-depth review of how they missed the fraud, drawing intense criticism. The results of their investigation will be released shortly.
Cotchett and Fineman represent about a dozen investors who lost money in Madoff’s decades-long scheme, an unprecedented global scam for which Madoff eventually pleaded guilty to laundering, securities fraud and perjury.
“It was an extraordinary visit. He was very candid, very open, and answered every one of our questions,” Cotchett said of the 4-1/2-hour meeting.
He was “very remorseful” but looked healthy and appeared to be working out, Cotchett told the news outlets.
“I think he’s not too happy to be where he is but he’s certainly not complaining,” said Cotchett, who set up the interview through Madoff’s attorneys.
The visiting attorneys said they planned to use what they learned at the meeting in a lawsuit to be filed this week in Manhattan against Madoff and his brother, Peter Madoff, who acted as chief compliance officer, and potentially officers at some of the feeder funds that worked with Madoff, according to the reports.
Madoff said he believed securities investigators had found all the money that could have been recovered, Cotchett said in the news reports.
“But it might be in many different venues, and by that I mean I don’t think that Bernie knows where all the money is” because some was paid out to feeder funds, Cotchett said.
Madoff agreed to speak with Cotchett after the lawyer threatened to sue his wife, Ruth.
“He cares about Ruth,” Cotchett said.
Some things just make a person aware.