Today in December 2008 when FBI agents lay Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme In shackles they will be kept for generations – and not just by the people who lost everything.
The numbers were amazing. A whopping $19 billion, all gone, stolen from over 40,000 investors – The New York Mets, Larry King, Kevin BaconHospitals, colleges, pension funds – more More than two decades.
Now, a new Netflix documentary series tells the rest of the story. According to Joe Berlinger, director of the “Madoff: Beast of Wall Street” quadruple on Wednesday, Madoff also managed a “significant portion” of funds for international organized crime,
This is why the New York native, who He died in prison in 2021 At the age of 82, Berlinger said, he was very ready to accept rap, as well as the 150-year prison sentence that followed. Madoff had no remorse – his guilty plea was just a final act of selfishness. He was trying to survive.
“People feel it’s one of the reasons he immediately admitted his guilt, saying it was all, and going to jail wasn’t an act of bravery,” Berlinger told The Post. Instead of trying to obfuscate, find a legal way out, or delay [a verdict]Part of that, I think, was self-protection to avoid mob injury.”
In fact, during the video recordings that were discovered, Madoff – who has been rumored for years to have ties to Russian crime syndicates and who is famous for He became friends with the head of the Colombo family Carmine John Persico Jr. while in prison – states that potential deals from the federal government are on the table at the time of his trial.
“The attorney general wanted me to negotiate with them to make some kind of deal by providing information about who was involved in this fraud,” Madoff said during one of the filings. “The belief was that I couldn’t do all this myself, that there must be other people involved.”
In addition to possible mafia connections, the new series looks at Madoff’s right-hand man, Frank DiPascali. Berlinger said his fellow New Yorker was a “reliable lieutenant to all his evil deeds.”
Together with Madoff, DiPascali — who first joined the team in 1975 and died in 2015 at the age of 58 while awaiting sentencing for multiple financial crimes — created false returns and investments, which, even for the savviest (or luckiest) traders ), made profits that were unimaginable.
“There was one simple fact that Bernie Madoff knew, I knew, and others knew, but we didn’t tell clients and we didn’t tell regulators like the SEC,” DiPascal admits in his testimony. There were no purchases or sales of securities in their accounts. It was all fake, it was all fake.”
Madoff was considered one of the giants of Wall Street, advising the Securities and Exchange Commission after the market crash of 1987 and was instrumental in the formation of Nasdaq – the stock exchange he headed in the 1990s.
But from the start of his career, Madoff has been living a double life, with the esteemed Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, LLC occupying the 19th floor of the Lipstick Building in midtown Manhattan at 885 Third Ave. , two floors above where the historic Madoff heist was. Organized by an unexpected cast of characters.
“17th floor.” [was] said Berlinger, an Academy Award nominee who also produced “Jeffrey Epstein: Dirty Rich.” The claustrophobic space, the notary added, was a maze of dot-matrix printers, file boxes and forged financial documents.
Ultimately, Madoff’s downfall was the infamous housing market crash of 2008, which decimated the stock market and caused investors to suddenly pull their money out of the fund.
“If it weren’t for this black swan event of the mortgage meltdown that caused the financial crisis, it would have been literally a once-in-a-century event,” Berlinger said. “Didn’t this happen? I think this would have gone on for decades.”