Madoff: An Insider's View Part II
Part II Madoff Employee Breaks Silence By Lucinda Franks Excerpt. Link to Follow.
NEVER DAWNED ON ME...“It never dawned on me that Bernie was running a criminal operation down on the 17th floor. I thought he was just a quirky guy. Now, in hindsight there are a lot of things that point to illegal activities. The emails, for instance, were clearly handled that way so that nobody could access them. They didn’t want any record if someone got suspicious and wrote so to a colleague, for instance, or you pressed the search bar and the word Ponzi came up.”
The salaries, said the employee, also in hindsight, were so large because Madoff wanted to keep people happy;....“Nobody left because they could never get another job that paid as well as this one. Some people, after his arrest, speculated that it was kind of like hush money; nobody asked any questions because the Madoffs were nice, protective, generous.
"The Madoffs had all of us out to Montauk for yearly weekends....."It was a family affair, everyone brought their spouses and children, but on the beach, the Madoffs socialized with themselves. The employees stood apart.
THE SECRETIVE 17TH FLOORThe employee says he only saw the 17th floor, where the fraudulent Investment Advisory operation was located, about two times. He noticed the out-of-date computers and the old-fashioned dot-matrix printers that printed out paper with green and white stripes. The computers he saw were about 15 years old, including one system that “is not even around anymore—miles away from modern Windows technology. And the statements I've seen from victims don’t look like my statements from Fidelity. They had primitive typefaces, as though they had been typed on a typewriter. Nobody sends statement like that, so maybe it was done to create the illusion of old-fashioned transparency.”
He learned that those who staffed the 17th floor were less than knowledgeable, often uneducated, often appeared incompetent. .....Looking back, he speculates that the faked statements were essentially done manually. He thinks two people did research as to what a blue-chip stock historically traded for and a similar price was chosen and the fake trades entered into a computer, the statements printed out and sent to unsuspecting clients. “I wonder whether everyone’s statements were basically the same, just varied a bit, because if they weren’t that would be a lot of work for the employees down there.”
Annette Buongiorno’s unit was in a separate part of the office. Two assistants who worked for her have reportedly told investigators that they were told to help generate the false trades.....
The firm’s odd way of being run was chalked up to Bernie’s quirkiness. “We just thought he was a brilliant eccentric man.” The 17th floor, for instance, to the shock of the employee, was messy. Papers strewn on desks, people in jeans, a sense of organized chaos.
The salaries, said the employee, also in hindsight, were so large because Madoff wanted to keep people happy;....“Nobody left because they could never get another job that paid as well as this one. Some people, after his arrest, speculated that it was kind of like hush money; nobody asked any questions because the Madoffs were nice, protective, generous.
"The Madoffs had all of us out to Montauk for yearly weekends....."It was a family affair, everyone brought their spouses and children, but on the beach, the Madoffs socialized with themselves. The employees stood apart.
THE SECRETIVE 17TH FLOORThe employee says he only saw the 17th floor, where the fraudulent Investment Advisory operation was located, about two times. He noticed the out-of-date computers and the old-fashioned dot-matrix printers that printed out paper with green and white stripes. The computers he saw were about 15 years old, including one system that “is not even around anymore—miles away from modern Windows technology. And the statements I've seen from victims don’t look like my statements from Fidelity. They had primitive typefaces, as though they had been typed on a typewriter. Nobody sends statement like that, so maybe it was done to create the illusion of old-fashioned transparency.”
He learned that those who staffed the 17th floor were less than knowledgeable, often uneducated, often appeared incompetent. .....Looking back, he speculates that the faked statements were essentially done manually. He thinks two people did research as to what a blue-chip stock historically traded for and a similar price was chosen and the fake trades entered into a computer, the statements printed out and sent to unsuspecting clients. “I wonder whether everyone’s statements were basically the same, just varied a bit, because if they weren’t that would be a lot of work for the employees down there.”
Annette Buongiorno’s unit was in a separate part of the office. Two assistants who worked for her have reportedly told investigators that they were told to help generate the false trades.....
The firm’s odd way of being run was chalked up to Bernie’s quirkiness. “We just thought he was a brilliant eccentric man.” The 17th floor, for instance, to the shock of the employee, was messy. Papers strewn on desks, people in jeans, a sense of organized chaos.
posted by CR English at 11:37 AM
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