Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Madoff says the banks HAD to have known (NYTimes)

Jim R. Bounds/Bloomberg News
The Federal Correctional Complex in Butner, N.C., where Bernard L. Madoff , convicted in a Ponzi scheme, is imprisoned.

From Prison, Madoff Says Banks ‘Had to Know’ of Fraud

Published: February 15, 2011
BUTNER, N.C. — Bernard L. Madoff said he never thought the collapse of his Ponzi scheme would cause the sort of destruction that has befallen his family.
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In his first interview for publication since his arrest in December 2008, Mr. Madoff — looking noticeably thinner and rumpled in khaki prison garb — maintained that family members knew nothing about his crimes.
But during a private two-hour interview in a visitor room here on Tuesday, and in earlier e-mail exchanges, he asserted that unidentified banks and hedge funds were somehow “complicit” in his elaborate fraud, an about-face from earlier claims that he was the only person involved in the fraud.
Mr. Madoff, who is serving a 150-year sentence, seemed frail and a bit agitated compared with the stoic calm he maintained before his incarceration in 2009, perhaps burdened by sadness over the suicide of his son Mark in December. In many ways, however, he is unchanged. He spoke with great intensity and fluency about his dealings with various banks and hedge funds. In asserting the complicity of others, Mr. Madoff in the interview pointed to the “willful blindness” of many banks and hedge funds who dealt with his investment advisory business and their failure to examine discrepancies between his regulatory filings and other information available to them.
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