Connecticut Firm Helped Madoff Go Global

Ponzi schemer taped giving associates tips to dodge regulators

(NEWSER) - The most important thing to remember if you want to fool the SEC is to act casual, Bernie Madoff told executives at Fairfield Greenwich Group. “You don't want them to think you're concerned about anything,” the Ponzi scheme mastermind said in a phone call taped in 2005, CNN reports. Most regulators are just looking to get some experience in order to work on Wall Street themselves, Madoff said. “You don't have to be too brilliant with these guys," he summed up. More»

Ponzi schemer a Luddite who crawled on all fours to align rugs

(NEWSER) - "Neat freak" may be one of the more polite epithets used to describe Bernie Madoff, who comes off as an obsessive-compulsive nut in a Fortune profile by James Bandler and Nicholas Varchaver. In immaculately tailored suits, he dusted furniture and got down on hands and knees to straighten rugs. Madoff, now jailed, would startle female employees by dropping trou to ensure his shirt buttons were vertical. More»

Mass. complaint vs. Fairfield Greenwich is regulatory, not criminal

(NEWSER) - Massachusetts regulators charged Fairfield Greenwich Group with fraud today, the Wall Street Journal reports, saying it failed in its fiduciary duties by funneling money into Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Fairfield was one of Madoff’s top feeder funds, and there was a “profound disparity between the due diligence that Fairfield represented to its investors…and the due diligence it actually conducted,” said the Secretary of the Commonwealth. More»

Former employee warned agency, others of 'Ponzi scheme'

(NEWSER) - A former employee of Sir Allen Stanford warned the SEC in 2003 of an “illegal Ponzi scheme” involving his firms, but regulators brushed off the allegations, the Financial Times reports. The whistleblower also told another regulatory body that one of Stanford’s companies was “engaged in a Ponzi scheme to defraud its clients,” but regulators didn’t come down on the alleged $8 billion fraud until last week. More»

(NEWSER) - The trustee liquidating Bernard Madoff’s companies said today the disgraced financier appears not to have purchased any securities for his clients for “perhaps as much as 13 years,” Bloomberg reports. It was “cash in and cash out,” Irving Picard said. "It was all just made up," a lawyer working with Picard said, according to the AP. "You got somebody else's money." More»