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MISCELLANEOUS NEWS ITEMS | |
ALLEGED MADOFF CO-CONSPIRATOR ARRESTED
And man who blew whistle
on Madoff has new book out
February 26, 2010
(NEW YORK) — The director of operations for convicted New York Ponzi scheme operator Bernard Madoff's defunct firm was arrested and charged Thursday with directing that false accounting entries go into the firm's books to conceal Madoff's fraud.
Prosecutors from the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan charged Daniel Bonventre, former operations director at Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, with conspiracy, securities fraud, falsifying books and records of a broker-dealer, false filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and four counts of filing false federal-tax returns.
The 63-year old Bonventre made a court appearance in New York Thursday afternoon where a judge set bail at $5 million. He faces as long as 20 years in prison each on the fraud, falsifying-books-and-records and false-filings charges.
Bonventre is the sixth person to be charged criminally in the case, including Madoff himself.
The 71-year old Madoff, for decades one of the most respected men on Wall Street, admitted in March 2009 to running a decades-long Ponzi scheme that bilked thousands of investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars over the years. He is now serving a 150-year prison term.
Prosecutors allege that Madoff’s Ponzi scheme stretched back to the early 1980s.
WHISTLEBLOWER ON MADOFF HAS NEW BOOK OUT
The man who spoon-fed the Securities & Exchange Commission all the evidence he claims the SEC needed to uncover the Madoff fraud years ago, Harry Markopolos, has a new book out called “No One Would Listen.”
In it he tells of the extreme difficulty he had in getting anyone’s attention that had the power to go after Madoff.
In the book Markopolos trashes without mercy what he portrayed were bungling, inept and unqualified employees at the Securities & Exchange Commission.
In an except released from the book and carried on the Huffington Post web site:
“Markopolos is withering in his dismissal of just about every SEC employee whom he approached, including New York Branch Chief Meghan Cheung — “the strongest impression that I got from her was that I was bothering her” — and Assistant Director Doria Bachenheimer. The notable exception was Ed Manion in the SEC’s Boston office who “was more determined to expose Bernie Madoff’s scheme than I was,” but was stymied by jurisdictional issues.”
“When he first brought his concerns — and a voluminous file — to the SEC in 2000, Grant Ward, the agency’s New England regional director of enforcement, was woefully unprepared to handle the assignment, writes Markopolos. “As I explained this massive fraud to Ward, it very quickly became clear he didn’t understand a single word I said after hello… if blank looks were dollar bills, I would have walked out of that room a rich man. He was coldly polite, but he didn’t ask a single probing question. I never knew if that represented a lack of interest, a lack of comprehension, or simply a desire to go to lunch.”
Markopolos also said he was prepared to kill Madoff if Madoff came after him. Again, from the book via Huffington Post website:
“If he contacted me and threatened me, I was going to drive down to New York and take him out. At that point it would have come down to him or me; it was as simple as that. The government would have forced me into it by failing to do its job, and failing to protect me. In that situation I felt I had no other options. I was going to kill him.”
Markopolos also told Fortune magazine that the heads of federal regulatory agencies should be prosecuted if they are grossly negligent in doing their jobs:
“Yes. They were regulators who failed to regulate. They made sure that their agencies were toothless and blind and mute…you can’t prosecute them after-the-fact, but going forward, I think they need to change the laws and they need to make the agency heads responsible for enforcing the nation’s laws and having competent staffs,” wrote Markopolis.
Markopolos also told Fortune he urges the S.E.C. to crack down harder on the over-the-counter “derivatives market”, which he says is 99 percent bad and only 1 percent honest.
Unregulated derivative investment securities were a key driver in plunging America in 2008 into the worst recession since the Great Depression.
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