Bernard L. Madoff is facing life in prison for operating a vast Ponzi scheme that began at least 20 years ago and consumed billions of dollars of other people’s money. While his fate will not be certain until he is sentenced, his lawyer
told a federal judge on Tuesday that he intended to plead guilty on
Thursday to all the criminal charges that federal prosecutors had filed
against him — a list that could yield a prison sentence of 150 years. Mr.
Madoff was arrested Dec. 12 at his Manhattan home by federal agents who
accused him of running what was perhaps the largest fraud in Wall
Street’s history. The scheme zigzagged across the world, drawing in
foreign banks, hedge funds, charities, celebrities and ordinary
retirees who had entrusted their savings to his investment firm. The
charges, made public late Tuesday, offered a few fresh details about
how Mr. Madoff conducted his long-running fraud. And they raised its
price tag from his own estimate of $50 billion to nearly $65 billion,
the total amount that thousands of customers were told they had in
their accounts at his firm. But left unanswered were questions
about the involvement of family members and employees and the treatment
of favored investors. To sustain his fraud, prosecutors said,
Mr. Madoff assembled an ill-trained and inexperienced clerical staff,
directed them to “generate false and fraudulent documents,” told lies
and supplied false records to regulators, and shuffled hundreds of
millions of dollars from bank to bank to create the illusion of active
trading. The government said Mr. Madoff ordered multimillion-dollar
bank transfers in part “to give the appearance that he was conducting
securities transactions in Europe on behalf of the investors, when, in
fact, he was not.” CONTINUE READING..