It’s been a decade since former NASDAQ Chairman Bernie Madoff was arrested for committing one of the largest financial crimes in U.S. history. For decades, he ran a Ponzi scheme from a secret office in New York, duping thousands of investors out of billions of dollars. Many of them lost everything when the house of cards fell.
How did Madoff pull it off? And what steps have regulators taken in the past decade to ensure that it doesn’t happen again? For this week’s episode, we teamed up with Steve Fishman, a reporter based in New York who’s followed the story for years. He produced and hosted a seven-part podcast for Audible called “Ponzi Supernova.”
Through interviews with financial experts, federal agents, Madoff’s cellmates and Madoff himself, Fishman explains how the $60 billion con worked and why Madoff was able to elude regulators for decades. Fishman says that while Madoff was the mastermind of the scheme, it was banks and other financial institutions that “weaponized” him, turning him from a “local swindler” into an unstoppable force.
Madoff will spend the rest of his life in prison, but no one from these institutions faced similar consequences. And even though some precautions have been put in place since Madoff’s arrest, financial experts warn that, for the most part, investors still are on their own.
Credits
Today’s show was produced by Fernanda Camarena with help from Michael Schiller, and edited by Taki Telonidis. Katharine Mieszkowski helped with fact-checking.
Original score and sound design by Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda, with additional music from Pear Blossom Music’s Glenn Kotche, Darin Gray and Mike Cruz.
Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The John S. And James L. Knight Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation and the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation.
Reveal is a co-production of The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX.
Transcript
Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.
| Section 1 of 5 [00:00:00 – 00:10:04] (NOTE: speaker names may be different in each section) | |
| Speaker 1: | If the end of 2017 taught us anything it’s that we need to have some tough conversations about what women are up against right now and what to do about it. If you’ve been wondering how can every day feminists make true equality happen, here’s a must listen from KALW in San Francisco and PRX, Inflection Point with Lauren Schiller. Join Lauren as she listens to women who are knocking on doors and breaking them down, who act when something is not right and who even find joy in resistance. To hear how women rise up, find Inflection Point with Lauren Schiller on Apple Podcasts, Radio Public, and PR1, and all the pod catchers. |
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. Today we’re starting the show in the streets of Brooklyn, New York. It is a chilly Friday. It’s gray outside. We are not far from Prospect Park. What’s the name of the bar we’re going to? |
| Fernanda C.: | It’s Erv’s on Beekman. |
| Al Letson: | That’s my producer, Fernanda Camarena. You heard right. We’re going to a bar, not because I need a drink. I mean, I’m not opposed to it, but that’s not why I’m here. I’ve come to meet the owner, a guy named Steve Fishman. |
| Fernanda C.: | Right across the street here, if you want to go in. |
| Al Letson: | Let’s do it. |
| Steve Fishman: | Al. |
| Al Letson: | Hey, man. |
| Steve Fishman: | How are you, Al? |
| Al Letson: | I’m good. How are you? |
| Steve Fishman: | I figured I’d greet you from behind the bar. |
| Al Letson: | Nice. What do you got lined up here? |
| Steve Fishman: | I got you a shot of bourbon. Obviously, that’s the way you start all your interviews. |
| Al Letson: | Cheers. |
| Steve Fishman: | Good to meet you. |
| Al Letson: | Steve’s bar is a cozy little hangout tucked into what used to be an old laundromat in a three-story brick apartment building. The blue laundromat sign still hangs in the front. Erv’s specializes in handcrafted cocktails. It has a machine that makes perfectly square ice cubes to drop into drinks. The bar is named after Steve’s father, Erv, who passed away last year. |
| Steve Fishman: | Two of these, and you feel like a billionaire. |
| Al Letson: | When Steve is not pouring drinks, he’s working as a journalist, a magazine writer and a podcast maker. A journalist owning a bar seems like a scary combination because every time I’m hanging out with journalists they’re drinking. I say, they. We’re drinking. How did you end up owning a bar? |
| Steve Fishman: | I spent a long time as a journalist. I actually dropped out of college and became a journalist for a small newspaper in Connecticut. The newspaper bought a bar. |
| Al Letson: | Smart newspaper. |
| Steve Fishman: | We would go right down because I worked a 3:00 to midnight shift. Then we would go right down to the bar until closing. Let’s face it, you sit down with a beer or a shot, and you start talking. It’s just great to hear the stories. |
| Al Letson: | Steve has chased a lot of stories through the years, but I’m here to talk to him about one that’s captivated him more than any other, the story of Bernie Madoff. Remember him, The New York financier who ran a ponzi scheme that cost investors tens of billions of dollars? |
| Speaker 5: | Mr. Madoff, what would you say to all those people that lost money, Mr. Madoff? What would you say to them? |
| Speaker 6: | Hey Bernie, give me one nice shot, buddy. |
| Al Letson: | Bernie duped people into trusting him with their money, and then put into fake investments, and doled out fake returns. Their money made Bernie and a handful of others rich. Then the market crashed in 2008 and exposed his scam. It was one of the largest financial frauds in US history with accounts that Bernie claimed were worth more than $60 billion. It was a lie, and when the bottom dropped out, it raised big questions about the safety of investments. Even though Bernie Madoff is a fading memory for most Americans, Steve says his story has lessons for us today.
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| Steve Fishman: | We are now living in an era that very marketedly proclaims itself to be not only pro-business, but anti-regulation. It’s an administration that really lives on and offers us the proposition that business, banks, finance does not to be regulated. It needs to be unregulated. To my mind, that’s exactly what led to somebody like Madoff.
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| Al Letson: | Wall Street analysts say President Trump’s new tax law could add fuel to an already hot stock market. Today’s market run is even stronger than the one that led up to the great recession. Steve remembers the market crash and the day he first heard about Bernie.
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| Steve Fishman: | Bernie gets arrested, it’s headlines. My editor comes over to me and says, “This might be a story for us. Let’s wait and see if it lasts the weekend.” I plunged into it. It was great journalistic sport. Everybody in the world was after Bernie. I thought I got to find this guy. He’s the poster boy for the financial crisis. I’m thinking if I understand Bernie, I’m going to understand the financial crisis.
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| Al Letson: | Unlike pretty much everyone else who covered Bernie, Steve stuck with the story long after it disappeared from headlines. He produced a podcast series for Audible on Madoff’s scam called Ponzi Supernova. Steve wanted to understand, really understand how Bernie got away with his scheme and what made him tick as a person. He talked to investors. He tracked down regulators and people who knew him. He was determined to talk to Bernie himself who’s serving a 150 year sentence in a federal prison in Butner, North Carolina. After Bernie got locked up he refused to talk to the media. Steve’s strategy was to get to Bernie by connecting with people who had access to him, his prison mates.
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| Steve Fishman: | Here’s a hilarious thing. Bernie is like a superhero to them, a supervillain to us, a superhero to them.
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| Casey White: | A superhero, a super criminal hero. Do you know what I mean?
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| Al Letson: | This is Casey White, a bank robber who was the first prison mate of Bernie’s who Steve connected with.
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| Steve Fishman: | He had been in prison with Bernie. He’s got an afro, a really lovely smile. Not a whole lot of teeth in that smile, but a really friendly guy, a great storyteller.
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| Casey White: | This is a man that done stole more money than anybody else. We’re talking about anybody else. One old man done took everybody. He done beat the record on everybody. He done went to the top of the list in criminality. Everybody is in there for money. The majority of the cases is about money. You know what I mean? Here you got a man that done took it all. He’s more important than Jesse James. You know what I mean? Bonnie and Clyde.
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| Al Letson: | Casey knew inmates who were still behind bars with Bernie. He smuggled a list of them out of the prison and gave it to Steve.
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| Steve Fishman: | Now, for me, these were the people who could get me to Bernie. I take that list, and I write to all 150 people on that list. The real break for me comes because there’s this guy in prison named Robert Rosso. Robert Rosso comes upon one of my letters, and he reaches out to me.
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| Robert Rosso: | It was nice for me that you were a writer. I’m sure it was nice for you that I was a writer.
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| Al Letson: | Robert became a writer in prison while serving a life sentence for dealing meth. Steve and Robert bonded, and one day Steve sent Robert a letter asking him to hand it to Bernie.
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| Robert Rosso: | I did, and I said you wanted to talk to him. He said, “I don’t really want to talk to anybody.” He walked off a little bit. He stopped, and he said, “Rob,” he goes, “What do you think of him?” I said, “I like him.” That’s what I said. I go, “I like him.” I said, “He seems like a straight shooter.” He goes, “Okay.” He goes, “Let me go take a look and read this.”
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| Al Letson: | Then one evening back in January of 2011.
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| Steve Fishman: | My home phone rings. It’s an evening. The Jets are in the playoffs. I remember that. I get this recorded voice, “You have a collect call from Bernard Madoff.” I’d been trying to get to this guy for like two years, and there he is on the phone. In the background my kids are shouting and screaming. My reaction, “Shut up! It’s Bernie Madoff on the phone!” Here’s the strange thing about the phone call from Bernie. It’s like a guy I could meet at a bar mitzvah. This guy, we’re both from the New York area. I recognize the accent. I probably have a similar accent.
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| Al Letson: | Calls from this prison are cut off after 15 minutes. Steve couldn’t move fast enough to record that first one, but then Bernie calls back.
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| Speaker 9: | You have a [inaudible 00:09:42] collect call from …
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| Bernie Madoff: | Bernard Madoff.
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| Steve Fishman: | Bernie?
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| Bernie Madoff: | Yeah. Hi, Steve.
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| Steve Fishman: | Hi. I was just saying it was great to talk to you because talking to you in person is so different than reading about you, all the caricature out there and the whole sense of you as being this one-dimensional person.
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| Section 1 of 5 [00:00:00 – 00:10:04] | |
| Section 2 of 5 [00:10:00 – 00:20:04] (NOTE: speaker names may be different in each section)
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| Steve Fishman: | He was being … you know, just this one dimensional person.
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| Bernie: | It was nice talking to you too, Steve.
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| Steve Fishman: | So, I’m immediately comfortable. And, I think Bernie’s comfortable, too. I mean, that was Bernie’s gift, you know. He was comfortable with everybody. And instill confidence in everybody. So maybe this is just Bernie being Bernie, but, we have this kind of rapport, and it leads into a very easy conversation. But i have to tell you, the thing that was stunning to me … Bernie wants to talk.
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| Bernie: | If he sounds okay on the phone, trust me, I’m not okay … I was under tremendous pressure … It was absolute- it was a nightmare. Only to me. It was only a nightmare to me.
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| Steve Fishman: | I guess you kinda knew it would end up here, you know, where you are now, sooner or later.
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| Bernie: | It’s when I say “nightmare,” that’s a nightmare. Imagine not being able to tell anybody. I destroyed the family. They said, “Why did you … need to do this?” And I said, “I don’t know.” Believe me, that’s what I try and figure out here once a week. The psychologist [inaudible 00:11:17] this place. Fortunately, they have wonderful psychologists here. And they’re very helpful to me.
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| Steve Fishman: | Wow, that’s great. That’s great.
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| Bernie: | Believe me, I have two full sessions with her every week.
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| Al Ledson: | The prison where Bernie is serving his sentence is known for having great medical facilities. And that includes therapy for inmates. It’s listed by Forbes as one of America’s 10 Cushiest Prisons. Steve became Bernie’s first interview with the media since landing there, but it wasn’t a standard Q and A. Steve almost became like a second therapist for Bernie, who opened up about his life. He talked about his father:
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| Bernie: | My father built a sporting goods business, he opened something called Dodge’s Sporting Goods. And he made a big successful business. And then, during the Korean War, there was a steel shortage. He couldn’t get steel, and his business failed. So I lived through that. You watch that happen, and you see your father, who you idolize, build a big business, and then lose everything. You [inaudible 00:12:16] about something like that happening.
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| Al Ledson: | And he talked about the Ponzi Scheme.
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| Steve Fishman: | You know, Bernie said to me, “If you think I woke up one day and decided to steal everybody’s money, you’re wrong. I didn’t need it.”
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| Bernie: | If you think that I did this, I woke up one morning and said, “Well listen, I want to be able to buy a boat, a plane, and this is what I’m gonna do,” that’s wrong. I had more than enough money to support any of my lifestyle and my family’s lifestyle. I didn’t need to do this for that.
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| Al Ledson: | Bernie already had a legitimate stock trading business and he was a former chair of NASDAQ. So, he wasn’t hurting for money. But he started the scam anyway. And once he got started, he couldn’t stop.
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| Bernie: | Cause it feeds your ego, I mean, you know, you say to yourself, “All right, all of a sudden these banks, which wouldn’t give you the time of day, some of them, all of a sudden they’re willing to give you a billion dollars.” I had all of these major banks coming down and entertaining me. It is a head trip.
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| Al Ledson: | In some of those conversations, Bernie sounds like a confident master manipulator. At other times, like people are taking advantage of him.
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| Bernie: | Everybody was greedy, everybody wanted to go on, and I just went along with it.
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| Al Ledson: | And he talked about the day his scheme came crashing down. December 10th, 2008. He had to come clean to his two sons. He says, they didn’t have a clue.
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| Bernie: | And then, my brother came in, [inaudible 00:13:40] said, “Well you know, you have to tell the boys. They know somethings wrong, they don’t know what it is.” So, we got into my car, and we drove the few blocks to the apartment. [inaudible 00:13:51] that Ruth was home. We had my Christmas party that night. That’s when I broke down and I told them. I … started crying and I say to em what the deal was. “I owe all this money out, and I’m not gonna be able to recover it.”
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| Steve Fishman: | And nobody gets angry at that point?
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| Bernie: | Everybody was stunned. They were shocked. I mean, they were scared, they were shocked. I mean look, just figure, one day you think your father’s running this multi-billion dollar business and everything is fine, and he’s happy and they’re happy and then, all of a sudden, the world comes crashing down. They saw me in tears. The last time I cried like that was when the [inaudible 00:14:38] moles and I found out my son had cancer … The afternoon I told them all, they immediately left, they went to a lawyer, the lawyer said, “You gotta turn your father in,” they went, did that, and then I never saw them again.
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| Al Ledson: | The family wold never recover. On the two year anniversary of his father’s arrest, Mark Madoff committed suicide, hanging himself in his Soho loft. Later, Bernie’s youngest son, Andrew, died of cancer. Andrew blamed the return of the disease on his father’s crime.
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| Speaker 4: | Do you think Bernie expected his children to turn him in?
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| Steve Fishman: | You know, I don’t know if he expected it, but he tells it … He tells it as a moving story. And a lot of people who won’t be moved by it. I will say this about Bernie, I kind of believe Bernie got like bone-tired. He just couldn’t support the lie anymore. But there was something about him that was relieved to finally see it end.
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| Al Ledson: | Steve learned a lot about Bernie during their string of 15 minute phone calls. They spoke around a dozen times, and then prison officials cut them off. But that didn’t stop Steve from piecing together the story of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. And how he was able to fool financial regulators and thousands of investors for years. That’s coming up on Reveal, from the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX.
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| From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Ledson.
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| All right, so what train are we gonna take?
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| Steve Fishman: | We’re gonna grab the B train, right here at a softball throw from Prospect Park.
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| Al Ledson: | Today I’m with reporter and bar owner, Steve Fishman. He traced the rise and fall of Bernie Madoff in the Audible podcast series, Ponzi Supernova. Bernie scammed investors for tens of millions of dollars. And we wanna know exactly how he got away with it. Right now, we’re on our way to the place where it all went down. The Lipstick Building, in downtown Manhattan. Bernie’s offices were in this building, and we wanna see if we can get inside.
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| Steve spent two years talking to investigators, auditors, and experts about how Bernie ran his scam.
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| [crosstalk 00:17:53]
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| We leave the subway, climb up onto the sidewalk, and walk through the cold, crowded streets.
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| Steve Fishman: | There it is. That’s the Lipstick building.
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| Al Ledson: | Which one?
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| Steve Fishman: | It’s the one that looks like the Lipstick building. You see it?
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| Al Ledson: | That one there?
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| Steve Fishman: | Yeah, the red one.
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| Al Ledson: | Oh, I see, I see.
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| Steve Fishman: | You see how it looks like a lipstick case?
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| Al Ledson: | The building is made of auburn marble and steel, and the edges are rounded, and, yeah, from the right angle, it does look like a lipstick case, with lipstick popping through at the top.
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| We enter the lobby.
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| Steve Fishman: | Wow. It’s so beautiful and it’s so quiet here, huh?
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| Al Ledson: | Bernie’s fraud went undetected for at least two decades. Steve explains that one of Bernie’s tricks for hiding the Ponzi operation was to put it on a separate floor from his legit business.
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| Steve Fishman: | He had a floor for his legitimate business, the [inaudible 00:18:45] making business, and then a floor that really nobody could get to. The 17th floor, where the Ponzi scheme was run.
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| Al Ledson: | So Bernie would come in here every day, to get to work?
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| Steve Fishman: | Yeah. He’d come in here, delivered by his car. Probably lived a mile uptown from here. His driver dropped him off here and went through this lobby. Which is kinda, it’s gorgeous and serene, this must be like …
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| Al Ledson: | But, it was anything but serene when the scandal first broke back in December 2008. Steve remembers interviewing an FBI agent who was assigned to investigate Bernie.
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| Steve Fishman: | So he was told to go up to the 17th floor, and he comes through this lobby …
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| Steve Garfinkel: | I walked in and I was thinkin, “What the hell is goin on here?”
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| Al Ledson: | That’s Agent Steve Garfinkel, who’s now retired from the FBI.
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| Steve Garfinkel: | There were a lot of people tryin to get upstairs to the 17th floor, and you know, they won’t let em in in the lobby. And he tells this story about just a crowd of investors just screaming and shouting, “We want our money!” “Where’s our money, where’s our money?” Yeah. “We worked in your offices and …” I’m thinkin, “Oh boy, some people are pissed off here.”
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| Steve Fishman: | So, somehow in this kind of, serene, almost empty lobby, you can ima-
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| Section 2 of 5 [00:10:00 – 00:20:04] | |
| Section 3 of 5 [00:20:00 – 00:30:04] (NOTE: speaker names may be different in each section)
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| Steve: | … This kind of serene, almost empty lobby. You can imagine it kind of filled with an angry horde, like something out of the ’30s. The Depression-era ’30s, when banks are failing and people are trying to grab as much money as they can, to get it safe.
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| Speaker 2: | We head out the door, and as we stand outside the red marble tower, Steve takes a last look.
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| Steve: | It’s so respectable-looking. It’s so serene and calm. You look at it and you see security guards and guys in suits, and you feel like, what could go wrong? You know, there are times when that respectable façade, it just melts away.
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| Speaker 2: | I sat down with Steve to find out how Bernie’s Ponzi scheme worked, and how he got away with it for so long. One key, the people Bernie hired.
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| Steve: | You can’t really put an ad on Craigslist saying, “Looking for somebody to help sustain a three-decade old Ponzi scheme.” Which meant that you had to appeal to a select group. The first person that Bernie hired … And this is going back three decades … Was Annette Bongiorno.
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| Annette was a high school graduate who was very likable. She was known in the office as the grandmother. She brought food every day to feed her colleagues.
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| Speaker 2: | One of those colleagues was a guy named Frank DiPascali. He never finished college, and he didn’t know much about trading, but he knew Annette. She was his childhood neighbor and babysitter. She introduced Frank to Bernie, and he eventually became Bernie’s right-hand man, his lieutenant, who really ran the fraud. Ran it day to day. Knew how it worked. And as soon as all hell broke loose, he came running in and wanted to play. As they say in the field, he wanted to play for Team America.
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| Playing for Team America meant telling authorities exactly how Bernie’s operation worked. Frank was interrogated by Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York at the time, Matthew Schwartz. Matthew is tall, clean cut, and remembers Bernie’s story with sharp detail.
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| Matthew says for months, the FBI would start the day by picking up Frank at his mansion in New Jersey. Even though Frank was still living in a fancy house, after the bust, he was broke.
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| Matthew S.: | He always packed his lunch. You know, we would all go out and buy a salad or something, and he couldn’t afford to do that. He would always bring a sandwich, and he always brought a sleeve of Oreos. There were a few times where I brought my kids in on the weekends, but sometimes the Oreos would be left over, and they would have one of what they called “bad guy cookies.”
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| Steve: | I think that the really startling thing that Frank DiPascali reveals through these daily interrogations is how rickety this machine was. I mean, these guys are stunned that this operation had fooled the world for a couple of decades. You know, it was being run by a handful of people without advanced degrees, who were using this vintage, antique technology. It’s crazy.
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| Speaker 2: | It was crazy, and ridiculously simple. Bernie and his cronies had to somehow convince investors that their money was generating big returns. So, they’d pick a stock and work backwards.
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| Matthew S.: | Yeah. Well, that’s how a Ponzi scheme works, right?
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| Speaker 2: | That’s Matthew Schwartz again.
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| Matthew S.: | So, how do I get $10 to appreciate to $15? He used to keep boxes of old Wall Street Journals, and they would take the stock tables, the stock prices that were published every day at the time. And they would just lay them out end to end on the floor. So it would be … You know, I can’t imagine … 10, 20, 30 feet of newspapers side to side.
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| And so, you’d sit in a office chair that had wheels, a wheeled chair, and you’d just sort of slide left and right, to pick the right day, with the right stock, with the right price.
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| Speaker 2: | Matthew says Annette in particular became a whiz at making numbers work, at reverse engineering these trades so it seemed like money was being made.
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| Matthew S.: | She would test out different permutations. All right, what if I do it on Tuesday? No, the return isn’t good enough if I do it on Tuesday. What if I say that it was purchased on Monday instead? Oh, okay. That does it. And sometimes she’ll circle it, and she’ll underline it. She was very expressive in her writing.
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| Speaker 2: | Once they had the numbers figured out, Matthew says they made up fake statements to send to customers. They showed that stocks had been bought and sold and made money, but the trades never happened. The statements were made using software that was written just for Bernie’s operation.
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| Matthew S.: | It was the machinery through which the entire fraud was perpetrated. It made up all of the fake records. Most of it was automated.
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| Speaker 2: | Two computer programmers, George Perez and Jerry O’Hara, wrote the software. At first, they didn’t realize that it was all a scam.
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| Steve: | It starts to dawn on them, maybe slowly. But certainly, they come to the realization that they’re involved with this criminal enterprise. They walk in to Bernie and they say, “Hey.” You know, “We want to do this.”
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| Matthew S.: | And Madoff says, “Okay, fine. Don’t write those programs anymore.” And then right afterwards, he turns to DiPascali after they’ve gone, and said, “Give them whatever they want.”
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| Speaker 2: | According to Frank DiPascali, Bernie’s right-hand man, the programmers think about it, then come back and say they want more money. And they want it in a certain way.
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| Matthew S.: | “Well, can you pay us in diamonds? That way there won’t be a paper trail. Can you pay us in diamonds?” DiPascali says at the time, he’s like, “What are you talking about? Where am I gonna get a bag of diamonds? We’re not paying you in diamonds.”
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| Speaker 2: | They eventually scrap the idea of diamonds, and settled for a raise. Hush money. And kept on making those fake account statements. But the trades never happened, and Bernie’s crew was paying old investors with new investors’ money. He had clients big and small, which he talked about in a deposition he gave in prison a few years ago.
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| Bernie Madoff: | I had four prime big clients. Jeffry Picower, Norman Levy, Carl Shapiro, and Stanley Chase, commonly referred to as The Big Four.
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| Steve: | These are four older Jewish men who were really kind of father figures to Bernie. They were great friends, in addition to being big investors. I mean, there’s the famous story about Levy on his deathbed, telling his children, “Trust Bernie. Trust Bernie.” And they come to him. He starts investing for them.
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| He claims that at first, he was making them legitimate money. But at some point, certainly by the early ’90s, it’s a full-blown Ponzi scheme. And they are taking out hundreds of millions of dollars. They’re taking out billions of dollars, in some cases. And for Bernie, that was an enormous pressure.
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| Speaker 2: | It’s at this point that the Ponzi scheme starts to slip out of Bernie’s control. Steve talked with a lawyer named David Sheehan, who spent the last 10 years trying to recover money for people who invested with Bernie.
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| Steve: | And basically, the modus operandi there was, “Hey. I know what you’re doing.”
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| David Sheehan: | Yeah, so I’m gonna take a lot of money out. That’s what they did.
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| Steve: | That’s pretty straightforward.
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| David Sheehan: | Yeah.
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| Steve: | I don’t think people know about that, do they?
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| David Sheehan: | No. I don’t think that’s widely known. I don’t think people thought of Bernie being, you know, [inaudible 00:28:19], because probably everyone thought … Or at least they all maintained the posture of, “I didn’t know anything.”
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| Steve: | Also, I think certainly the public perception. Bernie’s the powerful one. He’s conning people. But you’re saying exactly the opposite.
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| David Sheehan: | Yeah. I think he was, to a certain extent, a tool of these people. He may have started it out as a Ponzi, but I think they helped him perfect it.
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| Steve: | So, how do you withdraw now? How do you extract yourself without somebody, somehow, suddenly implicitly saying, “Bernie, the game’s not over til I say it’s over.”
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| Speaker 2: | But framing it that way makes Bernie sound like a victim here. Which, maybe in some sense he is, but also he had to come up with this scheme. The Top Four and the big banks, they didn’t come up with the scheme. Bernie did.
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| Steve: | Yeah, Bernie is clearly the author of this Ponzi scheme, and there’s no con man more talented than Bernie. Let’s face it. He was favored by circumstance, by luck, but Bernie is an incredibly skillful and talented liar. No other way to put it.
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| At the same time, Bernie could not have done this without the implicit cooperation of a number of institutions and investors.
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| Speaker 2: | One of the banks accused was the Spanish bank, Banco Santander, which controlled a company called Optimal Investment Services. Now, many of their clients were small-time investors who had gone in with their life savings. Banks are supposed to make sure that the funds they sell to their customers are stable and safe, and that’s where Rajiv Jaitly comes in.
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| Rajiv Jaitly: | I was, in effect, the hassle factor.
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| Speaker 2: | Rajiv was hired by …
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| Section 3 of 5 [00:20:00 – 00:30:04] | |
| Section 4 of 5 [00:30:00 – 00:40:04] (NOTE: speaker names may be different in each section)
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| Rajiv: | I was in effect the hassle factor.
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| Al Ledson: | [Rajiv 00:30:03] was hired by Optimal to do what’s called due diligence on Bernie’s fund, but immediately there was push back. Rajiv wanted to take a closer look at Bernie, but says his boss didn’t want him making waves.
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| Rajiv: | I think he was concerned that I would spoil a very good relationship.
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| Al Ledson: | A relationship that was making the bank a commission on every dollar it delivered to Bernie. Rajiv met with Bernie in February of 2006 and one of the things he wanted to do was see a trade from beginning to end.
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| Rajiv: | As you can sort of see how it’s entered into the system, how it might have appeared on the statements, in from the brokers, and so on. I was just told that that just simply wasn’t going to happen. I shouldn’t raise it.
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| Al Ledson: | Rajiv left the meeting with Bernie with, well, no answers. He went back to his office to write his report but didn’t feel he had enough information so he asked one of his colleagues to verify the trades.
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| Rajiv: | When I then rang up, to sort of see how it was going, he says “Oh no, no, we haven’t done that.” He said “Look, Rajiv, we all know you’re a difficult guy. We had to calm you down at that particular point so we agreed to it. But there’s really no need to do it, we’re all over this. We understand the investment strategy. It doesn’t need this.”
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| Al Ledson: | Rajiv says he typed up a report but it wasn’t glowing and it wasn’t what his bosses were looking for. They ordered a junior analyst to draft a new one.
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| Rajiv: | The report at its very beginning says that their view was that Madoff was a well run and efficient organization. To which my response was, on what basis? What evidence do we have for it?
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| Al Ledson: | This was Rajiv’s last straw. He quit working for Optimal.
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| Rajiv: | The reason I resigned was because I felt that Optimal weren’t serious about risk and so I decided it was appropriate for me to leave.
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| Al Ledson: | Rajiv’s boss was eventually prosecuted for mismanaging his client’s money. He was found not guilty. The other people whose job it was to uncover shams like Bernie’s were the regulators in New York.
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| Speaker 3: | I mean Bernie was under examination or investigation for years. But here was the amazing dynamics of that situation. Bernie is considered a lion of Wall Street. They send in the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC, the body that is supposed to regulate and watchdog people like Bernie, they send in investigators, examiners, but they are extremely junior. They’re young. They’re recently out of school. They’ve never investigated a Ponzi scheme before.
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| Al Ledson: | After the fraud was exposed, the SEC wanted to know why it’s people never caught on. So it conducted an internal investigation. It was run by David Kotz.
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| David Kotz: | I was only the second inspector general in the history of the SEC. Previous inspector general had been there for 18 years.
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| Al Ledson: | David did more than 100 interviews over the course of seven months. He even talked to Bernie, who told him about one encounter with an SEC examiner.
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| David Kotz: | Sort of acting like a tough guy and yeah he would lean back with his hands behind his head like Lt. Columbo, and asking these tough questions. He wore an SEC jacket with the word Enforcement emblazoned across the back. Now he wasn’t in enforcement, enforcement is the entity that essentially sues people. He was an examiner and that he sort of acted like a jerk and was acting really tough and like a big shot, yet Madoff pointed out that while he sort of acted like a blow-hard, in Madoff’s words, he never really asked any tough questions. So it was all a show Madoff was able to see through it really quickly.
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| Al Ledson: | But there was a couple times when examiners came close to exposing Bernie’s fraud.
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| David Kotz: | I mean it’s actually not that difficult to uncover a Ponzi scheme if you’re the Federal government. There are ways that you can go and see where trades are cleared.
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| Al Ledson: | When investments are bought and sold, money goes from the buyer to the seller. Clearing is a process where two accounts are updated to reflect the transaction. The buyer’s account shrinks and the sellers goes up. It’s proof that the money is actually changing hands. Sounds pretty basic, right. That’s what the Depositor Trust Company is for.
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| David Kotz: | There’s something called the DTC, basically it’s where money sits when the trades get cleared, when the trades get done. So there should be tons of money in Bernie’s account.
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| Speaker 3: | If the allegation is the guy isn’t trading, then you can go to this place and you can see whether he’s trading.
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| Bernie: | He asked me “Where are the securities for the client”, and I said “At the depository trust.”
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| Al Ledson: | That’s Bernie from a deposition taken from behind prison walls. Some agents wanted to verify that Bernie’s transactions were real, so they ask him.
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| Speaker 6: | Do you have an account at DTC? He said “Yes.” They asked him his account number.
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| Bernie: | 646, that’s my account name.
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| Speaker 6: | He gave them the account number.
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| Bernie: | When I left that meeting, I figured that’s it. They got me.
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| Speaker 6: | He thought Monday morning he’d be going to jail.
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| Bernie: | I lied to them and said they were at the depository and I figured for sure they’re going to call the depository on Monday morning and find out the securities weren’t there.
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| Speaker 3: | Somebody at the SEC does call the DTC, and asks about Bernie’s account, but all that person asks is “Does Bernie have an account?” Once he gets the yes, the person moves on. Now the next question they should ask is, how much money is in that account? Well Bernie should have had billions of dollars in that account. He had maybe a few million, tens of millions. The Ponzi scheme would have gone down, it would have been exposed, had they asked that one further question. But these guys are junior, they’re inexperienced, and they’re intimidated. They’re intimidated by Bernie, and they’re intimidated it seems by the functioning of the financial system. They just don’t know about the DTC.
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| Al Ledson: | The SEC missed their chance and it wasn’t just the SEC. There were private auditors sniffing around the find out how Bernie was making his money. The returns were impressive, and they wanted to know more.
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| Speaker 6: | So you have auditors sitting down and wanting to see reports, specific reports. Reports that Bernie doesn’t happen to have because hey guess what, he’s not really investing the money.
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| Al Ledson: | Matthew Schwartz the former US Assistant Attorney says Bernie’s right hand man, Frank [DiPascali 00:36:52] remembered one close call they had with auditors.
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| Speaker 6: | DiPascali testifies that he’s sitting in a conference room with the auditors. They ask for this report called a SIAC, report.
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| Speaker 3: | Well Bernie doesn’t have it, but Frank makes a phone call “Hey can you bring up the SIAC reports” and the guy says basically “The SIAC report? You told us we didn’t need the SIAC report. Where the hell am I going to get a SIAC report?” He says “Great, I’ll see you in 10 minutes.”
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| Speaker 6: | They’re frantically putting together and printing out this report, which is, you know it’s half a foot thick of this big paper, dot matrix paper, and then it’s supposed to be a report that’s been lying around of a month, and instead it’s hot off the presses. First they stick it in a refrigerator, that’s down in the investment advisory business, to cool it off. Then they literally play football with it. They’re tossing it around the room to one another to make it look weathered. Then they run it up to DiPascali.
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| Al Ledson: | Unbelievably it worked. They fooled the auditors.
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| For decades, Bernie tricked auditors and investigators into believing his lie. In the meantime his Ponzi scheme grew bigger and bigger. Like an enormous balloon. It took the great recession and investor panic to eventually pop it. Bernie should have been caught many times over says SEC inspector general David Kotz, but investigators missed every clue along the way.
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| David Kotz: | As we showed them the documents, as we showed them the information, as we showed them how easy it was for them to uncover it, all these defenses’ sort of melted away and they were themselves sort of astonished. There were some who were crying during the interview. We had to take a break because they were crying because they were so emotional. So as we are going through this, they’re realizing how easy it would have been for them to do, and how many mistakes that were made and the consequences of those mistakes.
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| Al Ledson: | The consequences? Ruined finances and upended lives of the people who trusted Bernie Madoff. After a short break we’re going to find out what happened to Madoff’s victims and try to understand if we’re safe from another Ponzi scheme like this. That’s coming up next on Reveal from the Center For Investigative Reporting and PRX.
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| For the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX this is Reveal. I’m Al Ledson. Bernie Madoff was a criminal mastermind. We’ve heard how he pulled off his Ponzi scheme for decades-
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| Section 4 of 5 [00:30:00 – 00:40:04] | |
| Section 5 of 5 [00:40:00 – 00:51:46] (NOTE: speaker names may be different in each section)
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| Al Letson: | Criminal mastermind. We’ve heard how he pulled off his Ponzi scheme for decades, fooling many of the people who worked for him, regulators, and investors. But it all came crashing down with the financial crisis of 2008. People were panicked. They wanted their investment back, but the money was gone.
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| Speaker 2: | It was the worst thing that’d ever happened to us.
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| Speaker 3: | Everything that we worked for is down the drain.
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| Speaker 4: | This can’t be real.
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| Al Letson: | Bernie had taken almost 18 billion dollars of their money. Now for some investors, it was their entire life savings and retirement. According to Bernie’s fake investment statements, that money had grown to more than 60 billion, but it was all a lie.
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| Speaker 5: | We have lost everything. I have lost everything and you have lost everything.
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| Speaker 6: | I manage on food stamps. Sometimes at the end of the month, I scavenge in dumpsters.
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| Al Letson: | And years later, Bernie doesn’t seem to understand how much damage he did to people who trusted him with their money. Here’s what he told reporter, Steve Fishman, from prison.
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| Speaker 7: | Now, of course, you listen to them, they’re living out of dumpsters and they don’t have any money and so on and so forth and I’m sure it’s a traumatic experience for some, but I made a lot of money for a lot of people.
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| Al Letson: | And he claims they knew what they were signing up for when they invested with him.
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| Speaker 7: | On all of their confirmation, on all of their statements, they saw there was things that they signed that basically they knew that this kind of trading is speculative. Believe me, if you don’t think they had doubts, they had doubts.
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| Al Letson: | Even if they had their doubts, the question now is, will they ever see their money again? I talked to Steve about that and he told me over the past 10 years, there’ve been a couple of efforts to recover and return as much of the money as possible, including something called the Made Off Recovery Initiative. It’s run by a court appointed trustee who works with a team of lawyers. They act like a clean up crew, searching for those investors who took out more money from Bernie’s fund than they put in. Then, they sue them to get the money back.
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| Steve Fishman: | So say I invested a million dollars with Bernie Madoff but I had taken out two million dollars because that’s what my statement said I had. Well, along comes the Madoff trustee and says, “You know what? You put in a million, you took out two million. You owe us the difference.” It was a very complicated and heart-wrenching situation for a lots and lots of people.
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| Al Letson: | So far, the trustee has gotten back more than 70% of the money. About 13 billion dollars. But there’s still thousands of people who may never get their money.
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| Steve Fishman: | What happened is the agencies in charge of trying to recover this ran into a wall because a lot of the funds were registered overseas. Well, their money could not claimed by the people trying to recover the money. It was in some kind of safe haven. It was like it was behind a fortress.
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| Al Letson: | So the question I have for you, Steve, is about accountability. Obviously, this was Bernie’s idea and he had people that were running it and a lot of them are paying the consequences of it. But there’s another side to it where you have all these big banks, the big four investors that we talked about earlier, and they haven’t been held accountable for anything.
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| Steve Fishman: | You know, once you get to the institutions that essentially took what was a local swindler, I’m talking about Bernie Madoff and weaponized him and brought him around the world and made him the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, I’m talking about the financial institutions, the hedge funds, the banks, none of those people are held accountable. No one from those institutions has put on handcuffs.
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| Al Letson: | So where does that leave people like you and me? People who want to save for retirement but are not financial wizes. Are we saved from the next Bernie Madoff? To answer that question, we decided to call a couple of financial fraud experts who know the Madoff case well.
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| Steven Richards: | Okay, so my name is Steven Richards. So what can I tell you about Ponzi schemes?
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| Al Letson: | Steven is what’s called a forensic consultant. He investigates financial fraud. Years back, he worked at the FCC and later for a private firm that investigated Madoff’s fraud. Steven led a team whose job it was to figure out how much people put into the Ponzi scheme and how much they took out.
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| Steven Richards: | But I think a lot of things have happened since the days of Madoff, active regulars in this civil environment that would make the likelihood of a large scale financial fraud like what Bernard Madoff did much harder to do.
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| Al Letson: | Steven says, “That’s because after Bernie, the FCC made some changes in its enforcement division and revamped the way it handles complaints and tips from whistle-blowers.” Many of these changes come under the Dodd-Frank Act, which was written to protect consumers and reform Wall Street. It was signed into law in 2010, but is it enough?
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| Jim Mintz: | The fact is that we live in a savage world, a place where nothing protects you except yourself. There’s no calvary coming over the hill.
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| Al Letson: | That’s Jim Mintz, CEO of the Mintz Group. Lawyers hire him to investigate cases they’re working on, and he’s been doing this for 30 years. Jim knows the Madoff case inside and out and says that even with Dodd-Frank in place, investors need to be skeptical of anything that sounds too good to be true.
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| Jim Mintz: | I’m here to tell you that out in fraud land where I do my investigative work, there doesn’t seem to be any protection or a new seat belt that the government is giving us.
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| Al Letson: | In fact, Jim thinks we’re more at risk today.
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| Jim Mintz: | The opportunities for fraud have grown since 2008 and Bernie Madoff because of the internet and because of the flattening out of the world so that there are opportunities that seem attractive for us to put our money in that are thousands of miles away.
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| Al Letson: | Jim says, “All you need to do is look at the headlines about bitcoin and other cryptocurrency.”
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| Jim Mintz: | Everybody’s talking about cryptocurrency. And if you listen carefully to how regular people talk about it, it’s almost as if they start to speak a little faster or a little with almost like having trouble breathing while they’re talking about it. And those are the signs that you’re entering a danger zone.
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| Steven Richards: | It has all the hallmarks of a place where you could have Ponzi type schemes more easily.
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| Al Letson: | That’s the forensic consultant, Steven Richards again.
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| Steven Richards: | So, for instance, the environment, bitcoin going from 10,000 to 19,000 and everybody’s seeing that wealth generation so quickly wants to be a part of it. You also have a situation where more people do not understand what a cryptocurrency is, how it was created, how they work.
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| Al Letson: | Cryptocurrency isn’t the first investment that people didn’t understand, but bought into anyway.
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| Steven Richards: | And humans have an inherent bias that want to believe that other people have their best interest in mind, and they don’t. And the other thing is the advancement of technology and a lot of other things have created this most simple access to people the fraudsters have ever had. And if they have access and they can create trust, they have the opportunity to do a Ponzi.
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| Al Letson: | Bernie’s Ponzi scam might seem like it happened a long time ago, but if you ask reporter Steve Fishman, who followed the Bernie Madoff story for years, he says it’s history worth remembering.
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| Steve Fishman: | Madoff was a huge deal. It affected 10s of thousands of people. It also served kind of as a cautionary tale for the ages. I mean, we live now in an era where deregulation is the watch word. Well, Bernie is the poster boy for what happens in a world in which deregulation is the rule.
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| Al Letson: | Bernie Madoff pled guilty to 11 felonies and is still serving 150 year sentence in federal prison. The only other people who were convicted were some of Bernie’s immediate circle of fraudsters, including his accountant, the woman who calculated the phony stock trades and the computer programmers who made the fake statements. Bernie’s right hand man, Frank Depasquale, pled guilty to several charges but died of cancer before his sentencing.
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| Many thanks to Steve Fishman for his reporting on Bernie Madoff and the financial crisis. His complete six part podcast series called Ponzi Supernova was produced by Audible. You can hear it at audible.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Check it out and you’ll find some unexpected stories from unknown victims of Bernie’s fraud along with a lot more jaw dropping detail about how it all went down. Steve’s new podcast is a seven part series from [inaudible 00:49:48] on murder injustice in the Bronx. It’s called Empire on Blood. It will be available March 7th.
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| Today’s show was produced by Fernando [Car-ma-rena 00:49:59] with help from Michael Schiller and edited by Taki [Te-la-nee-das 00:50:02]. Big thanks to Ellen Horne and Kelly Prime, producers of the Audible series. Also Todd Whitney, Colin Campbell, and Amanda Remus. Revealist, Catherine [Me-scal-ski 00:50:10] helped with fact checking. Some of the music for this week’s show was from Pear Blossom Music. Dan [Co-chi 00:50:15], Darren Gray, and Mike Cruz. Our production manager is [Mo-win-day He-na-hos-a 00:50:19]. Our sound design team is the Justice League, J. Breezy aka Jim Briggs and Fernando, my man, yo, Aruda. Krista [Schar-fen-burg 00:50:28] is our acting CEO. Amy Pall is our editor in chief. Our executive producer is Kevin Sullivan. Our theme music is by Comorado Lighting.
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| Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Johnathan Logan Family Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, and the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation.
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| Reveal is a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX. I’m Al Letson and remember, there is always more to the story.
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| Section 5 of 5 [00:40:00 – 00:51:46] |