…one evening a few weeks ago, my home phone rang. “You have a collect call from Bernard Madoff, an inmate at a federal prison,” a recorded message announced. Out of nowhere, there was that accent, familiar to anyone who’s visited Queens. Madoff apologized for calling collect. “I don’t have that much money in my commissary account,” he told me, before starting on a remarkable conversation that would stretch to several hours in more than a dozen phone calls. This being Bernie Madoff, in dollar terms the greatest criminal in history, I didn’t know what to believe. But I listened…

For anyone interested in the psychology of the man made famous for his long-running Ponzi scheme, it’s a must read story.

Bernard Madoff

Thank you, Bernie, for breaking your silence – even if you are still clinging to that cover-up mode you adopted since you took the entirety of the blame for your crimes.

What is clear is that ripping off the rich is punished far more severely than ripping off the poor. The lengthy sentence you were given spared countless other greedsters and goniffs from facing the music – what music there is.

In an interview – with a reporter from The New York Times who is writing a book to cash in on a man who has already cashed out – we learn, in the vaguest terms, that Mr M believes the banks he did his crooked business with “should have known” his figures did not figure. Keeping with the deceit that has served him well over the years, he names no names.

That said, how right he may be. There were many who should have known and done something about it. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and other regulators for one. Perhaps The New York Times for another. Remember, it was Madoff’s confession to his sons that started him on his way to his new 12′ x 12′ home from home – in a federal correctional institute, where he may dream of his seized penthouse, homes and yachts – rather than any press expose.

For years, he went undetected by business journalists, who knew – or should have known – what he was up to. There are even questions about the speed with which he was sentenced, preventing him from being tried - a process which, through diligent cross-examination, would have brought us more information on the details of his dirty deals.

Do not believe all you read

Even The New York Times interview is being disputed, reports the New York Post: “The trustee representing thousands of Bernard Madoff’s victims disputed a report that he personally grilled the Ponzi monster in prison.”

“There has been no direct communication between them,” said David Sheehan, the chief counsel for the court-appointed trustee, Irving Picard, after The New York Times reported that Picard and Madoff had met over the summer.

“The Times later changed a quote from Madoff and altered some text online that had implied Picard personally visited Bernie in the Butner, NC, lockup where he is serving a 150-year sentence. Picard did not dispute that his legal team met with Madoff.”

Madoff is also still not coming clean about the web of alliances he had internationally, as well as in New York. We live in a global economy after all. We now know of Swiss and Austrian connections - but what about Israel, where this ingratiating handler was well known for his connections with Jewish philanthropists and institutions? So far, that story has yet to be told.

At the same time, the people investigating Madoff are making a small fortune. According to the Financial Times: “The army of lawyers and consultants helping to recover funds from Bernard Madoff’s $19.6bn fraud stand to earn more than $1.3bn in fees, according to new figures that detail the cost of liquidating the huge Ponzi scheme.”

The comments of readers to The Times appear to be more insightful than the paper’s own reports. Here is one from Texas: “I actually, sort of, feel sorry for this man. He was just doing what many investment firms were doing at the same time. He has been imprisoned as a scapegoat – yet many people since then – and to this day – are doing the same thing. Where are the indictments against the thousands of other people who did the same thing - and knowingly led this country into financial disaster?”

Banks close ranks

The best reporting on this subject is not in the mainstream press but in a music magazine, Rolling Stone, where Matt Taibbi investigates why the whole of Wall Street is not in jail: “Financial crooks brought down the world’s economy - but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them,” he charges.

Madoff also believes the banks who serviced him did not want to know about his Ponzi scheme which, unfortunately, is probably true – and an attitude coming not just from the banks.

The Times report added: “He spoke with great intensity and fluency about his dealings with various banks and hedge funds, pointing to their ‘willful blindness’ and their failure to examine discrepancies between his regulatory filings and other information available to them.

“‘They had to know,’ Mr Madoff said. ‘But the attitude was sort of: “If you’re doing something wrong, we don’t want to know.”‘”

Yves Smith of NakedCapitalism.com quips: “This sounds credible – but it also seems more than a tad self-serving.”

Andrew Leonard asks in Salon: “Should we trust him? After all, if there is one thing we know about Bernie Madoff, it is that he is one hell of a liar. But as evidence emerges that bank executives were exchanging emails wondering about Madoff’s amazing investment record, the possibility that the banks were purposefully looking the other way is not inconceivable.”

The truth is that many of us still do not really want to know – because, if we did, we would have to do something about it.

By their actions, both Democrats and Republicans clearly appear to prefer the most simplistic understandings – or misunderstandings.

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), like the 9/11 and Warren Commissions before it, avoided key issues. The FCIC inquiry did not call for a criminal indictment of wrongdoers. While informative, its report was ultimately a dud – telling us mostly what we knew, although there were some disclosures that our tepid press still missed.

Now the Republicans want to water down the regulations on derivatives in the Dodd-Frank financial ‘reform’ legislation, claiming they will lead to a loss of jobs. This is predictable: Every effort to defend big business is always couched in terms of helping the public.

The New York Times reported: “Representative Stephen Lynch, Democrat of Massachusetts, warned: ‘You think regulation is costly? How about the $7trillion we just lost from not regulating the derivatives markets?’”

There was no response from his colleagues.

So who will do anything about it?

The political right prefers to change the subject, while the left does not seem to have the time or energy to make economic justice its principal concern – even as polls show the economy is the number one problem for most in the US.

Progressives should hang their heads in shame at the minimal amount of activism taking place against the banks and the escalating numbers of foreclosures. Homes and hope are being stolen from people for whom the term “depression” now has a personal, as well as economic, meaning.

The other day, economist Jeff Sachs - who has a lot of atoning to do for his own misguided, destructive economic advice to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union – warned that little is being done about economic inequity and the growing ranks of the poor in the US. He asks if people who run things in the US want “another Egypt”. He is a policy wonk, not an activist – and likely fears the idea.

Many activists say they want to emulate the Egyptians, but who will organise anything as effective – even in a land that used to be known for people’s movements – to raise hell? In Egypt, young people used the internet to organise and mobilise for change. In the US, the internet seems to function more as an escape valve, consuming hours of our time and giving us another way to talk to each other – and ventilate against the government. Social media here seems to be more for socialising.

The government supports internet freedom abroad – but restricts it and spies on it at home. Obama has already supported a law allowing him to shut it down here in a national emergency.

The passivity of the public is one result of the inundation by middle-of-the-road media and effective information deprivation.

As Noam Chomsky puts it: “The population in the United States is angry, frustrated and full of fear and irrational hatreds. And the folks not far from you on Wall Street are just doing fine. They’re the ones who created the current crisis. They’re the ones who were called upon to deal with it. They’re coming out stronger and richer than ever. But everything’s fine – as long as the population is passive.”

That is our problem, Bernie. Even if the people want to know, it is not that easy to find out. Let us thank the media and our government for that.

Filmmaker and News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org.

For more on his film Plunder: The Crime of Our Time and companion book The Crime Of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big To Jail, visit plunderthecrimeofourtime.com.

A Wall Street Psychopath?

In 1960 Bernie Madoff founded his Wall Street firm, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC. As chairman of its Board of Directors until his arrest in December of 2008, Madoff saw his firm (and himself) rise to prominence on Wall Street, developing the technology that became NASDAQ, the first and largest electronic stock exchange in America, in the process.

A multimillionaire with over $800-million in shared assets with his wife and high school sweetheart, Ruth Alpern, Madoff was well-regarded as a financial mastermind and prolific philanthropist. He exuded an aura of wealth, confidence, and connections, and many trusted him as a pillar of the community. Sounds like a great guy, huh?

His humanitarian image was supported by his work for various nonprofit groups like the American Jewish Congress and Yeshiva University in New York, the various commissions and boards on which he sat, and the millions he donated to educational, political, cultural, and medical causes. As his firm’s website made clear at the time (it has now been removed): “Clients know that Bernard Madoff has a personal interest in maintaining the unblemished record of value, fair-dealing, and high ethical standards that has always been the firm’s hallmark.” It’s funny how things change with a little perspective and a pattern emerges only in retrospect. It wasn’t until December of 2008 that the public became aware that this “personal interest” was anything but one of integrity, and that image stopped being taken for reality.

In a discussion with Condé Nast Portfolio Editor in Chief Joanne Lipman, Holocaust survivor, Nobel laureate and Madoff victim Elie Wiesel said: “I remember that it was a myth that he created around him… that everything was so special, so unique, that it had to be secret. It was like a mystical mythology that nobody could understand… He gave the impression that maybe 100 people belonged to the club. Now we know thousands of them were cheated by him.”…

[continues at at SOTT.net]

What’s it like to walk in Bernie Madoff’s shoes? You’ll get a chance to buy them, along with the billionaire swindler’s monogrammed socks, size 40-short suits and other items from his New York City and Montauk homes at an auction to be held in Morris County this spring.

James Plousis, U.S. Marshall for New Jersey, has worked out a deal to use donated space at the county’s public safety academy in Parsippany for a Madoff auction, likely to be held in April or May.

“We want to run an auction for as little cost as possible, so that just about every penny we make can go back to the victims,’’ Plousis said Wednesday. “I called Sheriff (Edward) Rochford in Morris County and he and the freeholders were very accommodating to us.’’

The planned auction will include furniture, rugs, clothing, utensils, wall hangings and hundreds of pairs of shoes — just about everything seized from Bernard and Ruth Madoff’s three-bedroom New York penthouse and three-bedroom Montauk home, Plousis said.

Also, they will auction the contents of a five-bedroom, five-bathroom Bridgewater house owned by Frank DiPascali, who was Madoff’s right-hand man in the massive Ponzi scheme.

Plousis pitched the sale location to Rochford about three weeks ago, the sheriff said.

“They needed a place with a lot of space and plenty of parking,’’ said Rochford. “When they sold his stuff in Miami, they had a huge turnout of people and media from all over the world. We’d have to be prepared for that.’’…

[continues at NJ.com]

DURHAM, NC — A source tells ABC11 Eyewitness News that disgraced financier Bernie Madoff is being treated for serious injuries after he fell out of his prison bed.

ABC11 Eyewitness News first reported that Madoff had injuries consistent with an assault. Now, the source says Madoff was not attacked in prison, but that he fell off a bed onto his face. The source said there was a lot of facial bleeding.

Sources also confirmed Madoff was treated at Duke University Medical Center in Durham last Friday and discharged earlier this week. He is serving a life sentence at the federal prison in Butner after admitting to cheating investors out of billions of dollars.

According to the sources, Madoff came to Duke with facial fractures, broken ribs and a collapsed lung.

Read More on ABC News

In a wide-ranging jailhouse interview with SEC Inspector General David Kotz, convicted swindler Bernard Madoff explained how he managed to conceal his multi-billion-dollar fraud operation.

“It never entered the SEC’s mind that it was a Ponzi scheme,” Madoff said, because of “the reputation I had.”

“They thought the likelihood of Madoff being a big criminal was probably not something that was realistic,” said Paul Atkins, a former SEC Commissioner.

At the height of his career, Madoff was regarded as a financial genius, he even served as chairman of NASDAQ.

In 2003, Madoff was sure he would be caught and was surprised when investigators did not check his accounts to see if he had actually traded stocks – which he had not.

It is accounting 101, Madoff told the inspector general, to look at DTC – Depositor Trust Commission – to discover a Ponzi scheme.

“With one phone call they could have brought the whole thing down,” Atkins said.

“I worried every time,” Madoff said in the interview. “I wish they caught me six years ago, eight years ago”…

from AP:

PALM BEACH, Fla. — Jeffry Picower, a philanthropist accused of profiting more than $7 billion from the investment schemes of his longtime friend Bernard Madoff, was found at the bottom of the pool at his oceanside mansion and died Sunday, police said. He was 67.

Picower’s wife, Barbara, discovered his body and pulled him from the water with help from a housekeeper, authorities said. He was pronounced dead at Good Samaritan Medical Center at about 1:30 p.m.

Palm Beach police are investigating the death as a drowning, but have not ruled out anything on the cause of death.