Bernie Madoff pleads guilty to 11 counts

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He plead guilty to all eleven counts.
 

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He apologized, but that didn't carry well with some of his victims.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090312/ap_on_bi_ge/madoff_scandal
. . . .
Madoff pleaded guilty to charges including fraud, perjury and money-laundering, telling the judge that the scheme began in the early 1990s, when the country was in a recession and the market was not doing well.
. . . .
"When I began the Ponzi scheme I believed it would end shortly and I would be able to extricate myself and my clients from the scheme," he said. "However, this proved difficult, and ultimately impossible, and as the years went by I realized that my arrest and this day would inevitably come."
. . . .
Apparently at some point in the last decade, Madoff realized that someday, someone was going to find out about his scheme, but he didn't stop, he just kept taking peoples' money!
 
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The most incredible thing I've heard about this case is Elie Wiesel's call for a Federal bail out for Madoff's thievery.
Wiesel said he is planning legal action against Madoff but called for the federal government to bail out charities just as it has bailed out carmakers and banks.

"I think it would be a great gesture that the Obama administration should show, we really think of those who are helpless and who are doing with their money only good things."
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/02/27/wiesel.madoff/

Fuggedaboutit, unless the Government plans on getting into bailing out the victims of the stock market, and CNBC's Cramer pumping stocks to unsustainable levels.
 
It was his first offence !
 
mgb_phys said:
It was his first offence !
He pleaded guilty to 11 offenses, many of which played out over many years. Next for the prosecution should be Madoff's wife and relatives that profited from his thievery. It's a drop in the bucket, but she's parked in a $7M penthouse and has vacation properties all over the world, and those should all be forfeited. The fiction that "she didn't know" is a slap in the face to the investors who were cleaned out by the Madoffs.
 
turbo-1 said:
He pleaded guilty to 11 offenses, many of which played out over many years.
I know it is functionally about the same, but I think it would have been nice if they had charged him with a couple hundred thousand separate offenses, one for each money transaction into or out of his fund.
 
LowlyPion said:
The most incredible thing I've heard about this case is Elie Wiesel's call for a Federal bail out for Madoff's thievery.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/02/27/wiesel.madoff/

Fuggedaboutit, unless the Government plans on getting into bailing out the victims of the stock market, and CNBC's Cramer pumping stocks to unsustainable levels.

ugh. I'm sure this will piss off some people, but so be it. the fact is, Madoff ripped off a huge number of fellow jews and jewish charities. most (Ben Stein being a notable exception) simply failed to do any due diligence, and it appears they invested in Madoff simply because he is jewish. it is quite reasonable to assume that they thought they were getting in on a special deal, and therefore carries a tinge of racism. i don't think it is appropriate to get the government involved in supporting this sort of thing. furthermore, if you look at a list that was published at the New York Times, quite a few of these charities appear to have lost everything, down to the penny, because they did not distribute their assets but put everything in Madoff's fund. perhaps they thought the fund distributed risk for them, but it still seems like poor management to me.
 
turbo-1 said:
Next for the prosecution should be Madoff's wife and relatives that profited from his thievery.
Robert Maxwell's sons were directors of his company when it stole $1Bn of pension funds - they didn't even get disqualified as directors.
 
russ_watters said:
I know it is functionally about the same, but I think it would have been nice if they had charged him with a couple hundred thousand separate offenses, one for each money transaction into or out of his fund.
That's a good point, Russ. Or at a minimum, he should have been charged for every single person and group that he victimized.
 
no need to throw the book at him. save some charges in case he earns some acquittals. ;)
 
Proton Soup said:
no need to throw the book at him. save some charges in case he earns some acquittals. ;)

He pled guilty to 15 felonies today. I'm not seeing much opportunity for reversing.

If he really cheated the Russian Mafia as I have seen discussed, I'd think the term of his sentencing may not be a big issue.
 
LowlyPion said:
He pled guilty to 15 felonies today. I'm not seeing much opportunity for reversing.

If he really cheated the Russian Mafia as I have seen discussed, I'd think the term of his sentencing may not be a big issue.
maybe let him out on bail and let nature take it's course? I'd rather see some disclosure and claw-back.
 
The more intriguing battles of Madoff's legacy remains. It seems the Government is intending to claw back payouts from the enterprise. So if you invested 20 years ago and you've been taking out payments every year, and you have gotten back more than you put in initially you not only lost your account, but you may owe to the Government.
 
He might make $.75 an hour in the prison shop, or get a few years off for good behavior.

Trading with cigarettes was not what he bargained for.
 
I'm not an American so I don't know this - but does he go to a special prison? Or is he thrown into normal prison with rampant prison rape?
 
LowlyPion said:
He pled guilty to 15 felonies today. I'm not seeing much opportunity for reversing.

If he really cheated the Russian Mafia as I have seen discussed, I'd think the term of his sentencing may not be a big issue.

well, my bad. it seems he has pled guilty, so worrying about acquittals is pointless.

what is this about the russian mafia? i guess if he shows up completely bald or with a bad case of scarring acne, we'll know they got to him.
 
According to one person interviewed on The NewsHour, on PBS, people who profitted from Madoff's scheme, primarily early investors, may have to give back the profits.
 
Can the people who fooled by Madoff be called idiots/blind?

If he was just being clever and other being idiots, I don't know why anyone should get anything back (Knowing that this is not something new).
 
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By all accounts that I've heard, it was a very sophisticated sham that tricked even seasoned and sophisticated Wall Street investors. And it isn't like they lost their money; it was stolen.
 
Ivan Seeking said:
By all accounts that I've heard, it was a very sophisticated sham that tricked even seasoned and sophisticated Wall Street investors. And it isn't like they lost their money; it was stolen.

I remember my parents getting tricked into this once .. all money was just disappeared. No one ever found even a single penny! But, it didn't affect us much. That's why I don't trust these kind of complicated schemes much.
 
One person was commenting tonight that it is very difficult to hide $50-$65 Billion. It all had to go somewhere.
 
He's facing a potential of 150 years in prison, which is pointless at anyone's age, but especially so per his age. He doesn't have all that much longer to live anyway. Short of executing him, they have no means by which to appropriately punish the thieving parasite.
 
Madoffs were worth more than $823M, documents show
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090314/ap_on_bi_ge/madoff_scandal_assets
NEW YORK – Bernard Madoff and his wife had $823 million in assets at the end of last year, including $22 million in properties stretching from New York to the French Riviera, a $7 million yacht and a $2.2 million boat named "Bull," according to a document his lawyers filed Friday.

The document, prepared for the Securities and Exchange Commission at the end of last year, was contained in papers filed with the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in an effort to get Madoff freed on bail.

Among the couple's assets: a $12 million half share in a plane, $65,000 in silverware and a $39,000 piano. It values their four properties — in Manhattan, Montauk, Palm Beach, Fla., and Cap d'Antibes, France — at $22 million, and the furniture, fine art and household goods in the homes at $8.7 million.

But the bulk of Madoff's assets, according to the document, consists of an estimated $700 million value put on his investment business. Madoff said during his plea that the market making and proprietary trading side of his business were "legitimate, profitable and successful in all respects."
. . . .
Among those under scrutiny is Madoff's wife, Ruth, who withdrew $15.5 million from a Madoff-related brokerage firm in the weeks before Madoff's Dec. 11 arrest, including a $10 million withdrawal on Dec. 10.

Passing references to Ruth Madoff during her husband's guilty plea Thursday drew laughter from a mocking audience of investors still bristling over a disclosure several weeks ago that she wants to keep $69 million in assets, including the couple's $7 million Manhattan penthouse.

In addition, she faces potential civil litigation as a result of the collapse of her husband's financial empire. Her lawyer has declined to comment.
. . . .
It would seem to me that if Bernie Madoff is truly remorseful, he would be working very hard to help authorities identify where the money went. Still more to come in this case I guess.
 
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LowlyPion said:
The most incredible thing I've heard about this case is Elie Wiesel's call for a Federal bail out for Madoff's thievery.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/02/27/wiesel.madoff/

Fuggedaboutit, unless the Government plans on getting into bailing out the victims of the stock market, and CNBC's Cramer pumping stocks to unsustainable levels.
I'm fairly certain that there were many innocent bystanders in this who trusted madoff. in and of itself I would not think that worthy of a bail out but I hear that authorities had been presented with credible evidence that madoff was involved in illegal financial activities 10 or more years ago. I can see how one could argue the merit of a government bailout in the case of negligence on the part of the federal authorities.
 
According the the NYT, there is evidence that some fund managers that invested their clients' money with Madoff were complicit in his scheme and received unrealistically high rates of return, and pulled out billions shortly before Madoff's arrest. Will Madoff talk and implicate anybody else? IMO, it's unlikely that the DA would mitigate his possible sentence to any duration in which he would not still die in prison, so that leverage is probably non-existent.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/business/13madoff.html?_r=1&hp
 
Bernard Madoff Sentenced to 150 Years in Prison
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/bernard-madoff-sentenced-to-150-years-in-prison
 
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Here's some speculation back in March about his future career position:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/189099
Just where he will be sent is up to the Bureau of Prisons. Lawyers say that the potentially long sentence and the severity of the fraud to which he has confessed makes it unlikely he will go to the minimum-security "Club Fed" camps that some of his fellow white-collar criminals have inhabited.

The Bureau of Prisons denies any of the camps have golf courses, but they do have amenities. Some have no fences, for example, like the facility in Loretto, Pa. Some have soccer and baseball fields, including the McKean County Federal Correction Institution at Bradford, Pa., and Allenwood, in White Deer, Pa.

Allenwood, which was home to Watergate figure G. Gordon Liddy for a few years in the 1970s, is where many people from the New York region end up because of its proximity to the city. Prisoners bunk in pairs in 80-person dormitories there and are allowed to play ping pong and learn horticulture. The complex has low-, medium- and high security facilities.

Then again, Allenwood tends to be home to convicted mobsters, and seeing as Madoff made a few enemies in that line of work, Allenwood might not be the most secure facility for him.
The article goes on about other possible plazas...
 
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Well he will not enjoy prison at all for a whole lot of reasons :devil: Some people have said that he may be protected in prison by certain inmates in exchange for him handling their money but seriously, is that even going to happen? Who in their right mind would allow him to handle anyone's money? :smile:

Madoff will be in a medium-high security prison, surrounded by the most dangerous and violent inmates. I hope he wakes up and realizes that but it still does not undo the terrible crimes that he did out of pure greed and selfishness.