The work day was almost over when the newswires reported that a former Nasdaq chairman was under arrest for a fraud whose price tag was almost beyond belief: Fifty billion dollars!
Two floors below the trading floor of the respected wholesale brokerage firm Madoff had nurtured for almost 50 years was the mysterious money-management business at the heart of his fraud.
They were hedge fund managers and retired teachers, philanthropists and small-scale professionals. But they had one thing in common: They had trusted Bernie Madoff with everything.
The nation’s top market regulator immediately looked into the massive Madoff scandal, and found a humiliating scandal closer to home.
A week into the scandal, much about the Madoff scandal was still cloaked in mystery. But one thing was clear: it was history’s first truly global Ponzi scheme.
Sorkin’s faith in the majesty of the law was tested by the vitriol he encountered after he took on the Madoff case. One email he received: “As one Jew to another, I deeply regret that the Sorkin family did not perish in the Nazi death camps.”
As a veteran financial lawyer, Picard knew the federal bankruptcy code inside out, but his work as the trustee liquidating the Madoff estate would put him on a collision course with controversy.
Nothing in this industry-financed organization’s 30-year history as a “safety net” for Wall Street retail investors had prepared it for the Madoff maelstrom.
The Madoff scandal exposed a gaping hole in the defenses that all Americans relied on to protect their retirement savings.
In a majestic courtroom that was tense with tears and rage, a federal judge imposed a symbolic sentence on an utterly friendless defendant.
On the second anniversary of his father’s life-shattering confession, a Madoff son finds the scandal, finally, was just too much to bear.
In a case rich in superlatives, here was another one: the largest individual settlement in the history of American jurisprudence — a game-changer for Madoff victims.
Reflecting on his crimes, the con artist of the age wondered why his bankers didn’t catch him and shut him down.
A new federal bankruptcy court filing on Thursday showed that three current members of JPMorgan Chase’s executive committee had discussed, as early as June 2007, the possibility that Bernard L. Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme — as, indeed, he was — but took no action to protect investors or alert regulators.