Inside Look At Bernard Madoff's Life Behind Bars
"From the day Bernard Lawrence Madoff, prisoner No. 61727-054, arrived at the softer of Butner, North Carolina's two medium-security facilities in handcuffs and shackles, his over-the-collar hair shorn close, his rich man’s paunch diminished, he was a celebrity, even if his admirers were now murderers and sex offenders.
Yet even in this crowd, Madoff stands out. Every inmate remembers the day he arrived. “It was like the president was visiting,” a visitor to Butner that day told me. News helicopters buzzed overhead, and the administration locked down part of the prison, confining some inmates to their units, while an aging con man with high blood pressure shuffled through processing, where other inmates fitted him for a uniform and offered a brief orientation: “Man, chill out and go with the flow, ” was the advice of one former drug dealer.
Quickly, the flow came to Madoff. From the moment he alighted, he had “groupies,” according to several inmates."
("F*** my victims," Madoff is reported to have said to fellow prisoners.)
Read more the New York Magazine's profile of Bernard Madoff's new life behind bars.
HT: Steve Bartin
3 Comments:
The media seems to have very little interest in where Bernie Madoff spread around his ill gotten gains. Madoff was a big Democrat party contributor and a funder of many left-wing advocacy groups. Most media accounts ignore or make only slight mention of it like this Time Magazine article.
This was true of Marc Dreier, Norman Hsu and R. Allen Stanford, all Wall Street swindlers and big Democrat party money men.
Harry Markopolos struggled for 9 years to convince the SEC that Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme only to be met with the blank stares of regulators - mostly lawyers - out of their technical depth with regard to the industry they were supposed to be regulating. Of course, the politicians immediately called for greater regulation of the hedge fund industry, even though everything that Madoff had done was already against the law. I'm not aware of anyone at the SEC who was held accountable for their incompetence. In fact, Obama nominated Mary Schapiro who was FINRA’s chairman and chief executive officer, and thus responible for the Madoff investigations which failed to detect his wrong doing, for Chairman of the SEC. Pathetic.
What about his wife who clearly was complicit, and many of the others in the family who were also executives? Why haven't they been charged?
Anonymous partially nails it.
The guy OWNED Chuck Schumer and Chuck has enormous pull with the SEC. This SOB has never had a job outside of politics. Seriously - straight from law school to politics. He's never run anything or accomplished anything, yet Chuck gets to decide the winners and losers.
The SEC is no more incompetent than any regulator. There's nobody to hold accountable at the SEC. The SEC did what they were told by their overlords (politicians) and their overlords were purchased by the Bernie Madoffs of the world. It's that simple. People who rob other people have a lot of money to burn and buying politicians is just a necessity. It's like buying protection from the mafia.
Also, anonymous, FINRA was not the oversight body. FINRA was responsible only for the broker dealer dealer business. That business wasn't the business where the fraud was committed. The fraud was committed in his asset management business, which was a completely separate entity from the perfectly legitimate and compliant broker dealer business. What's pathetic is that we continue to believe that more regulation is going to solve this problem.
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