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<p>On Christmas Eve 2008, two weeks after Bernard L. Madoff confessed to running history’s largest Ponzi scheme, he and his wife, Ruth, attempted suicide in their Manhattan penthouse.</p> <p>Mrs. Madoff said in an interview with The New York Times: “I don’t know whose idea it was, but we were both so saddened by everything that had happened. It was unthinkable to me: hate mail, phone calls, lawyers.”</p>

Well they finally did it to themselves. At least now, and at least in one state, Democrat politicians are starting to feel the effects of the type of accounting fraud they committed on the country for the last three years.  As the Obama “It’s-not-my-fault” Reelection Tour rumbles westward spewing diesel-powered and politically enhanced particulate matter, charges of fraud are overhanging the Democrats’ fall campaign in California. But the charges aren’t the familiar “I see dead people voting” scams that usually accompany left-leaning races. Instead they are fraud charges of the Madoff kind.California Democrat uber-finance guru, Kinde Durkee, apparently has been...

Imprisoned financial scam artist Bernard Madoff boasted in a jailhouse letter that he is "quite the celebrity" and treated "like a Mafia don," ABC News said on Thursday. ABC, which will feature an interview with Madoff's daughter-in-law on news program "20/20" on Friday, released portions of a letter provided by Stephanie Madoff Mack, whose husband committed suicide in the wake of his father's conviction in a massive Wall Street fraud. Mack told ABC she had written Madoff a letter detailing family events he was missing due to his life sentence of 150 years behind bars, as a way of rubbing...

There goes Rick Perry again, saying things that make liberals’ heads explode. Speaking to a crowd in Iowa this weekend, the Texas governor and GOP presidential hopeful doubled down on statements he made in his book, Fed Up!, that Social Security is essentially a pyramid scheme. “It is a Ponzi scheme for these young people,” Perry said. “The idea that they’re working and paying into Social Security today, that the current program is going to be there for them, is a lie. It is a monstrous lie on this generation, and we can’t do that to them.” The left reacted,...

Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, says SEC may have destroyed documents“From what I’ve seen, it looks as if the SEC might have sanctioned some level of case-related document destruction,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, in a letter to the agency’s chairman, Mary Schapiro. “It doesn’t make sense that an agency responsible for investigations would want to get rid of potential evidence. If these charges are true, the agency needs to explain why it destroyed documents, how many documents it destroyed over what timeframe, and to what extent its actions were consistent with the law.” Agency staff “destroyed...

After 52 years of marriage, crook Bernard Madoff's wife is finally calling it quits. Ruth Madoff, 70, hasn't seen her 73-year-old hubby for more than 8 months, reports the Daily Mail. She's cutting ties with Madoff in an effort to reconcile with her remaining son, Andrew, and her dead son's family, say sources. Her son Mark committed suicide late last year on the second anniversary of his dad's arrest for massive fraud, and Ruth was turned away from his memorial by his distraught widow. "Ruth has not seen Bernie since Mark's suicide, and I think the remnants of the family...

In a remarkable development, the beleaguered Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) actually awarded the employee who botched the investigation of the largest Ponzi scheme in history with a cash bonus for a great job performance. It marks the latest of many scandals for the famously inept federal agency charged with policing the nation’s financial industry. An SEC Inspector General probe discovered that the agency rewarded an incompetent investigator who missed Bernie Madoff’s illegal, $50 billion Ponzi scheme with a cash bonus for good work. Released this week, the IG report doesn’t name the SEC investigator but confirms that he (or...

Why would anybody pay $675 for convicted swindler Bernie Madoff’s honorary diploma from Yeshiva University? The real question, exclaimed Rich Kroll, slapping his head after he got outbid for the diploma, is why anybody wouldn’t pay it. “It’s history! It’s the big thing! It’s the biggest thing of the century!” said the anguished Kroll, a North Miami online retailer. “I should have bought it — I should have kept bidding. I dropped out at $600, because I only have $500 in my pocket, but I should have found a way! I wanted it!” Kroll was just one of hundreds of...

Court-appointed trustee Irving Picard is looking to clawback monies from Madoff feeder funds........$9B from HSBC, $6.4B from JPMorgan Chase, $2B from UBS, $1B from Mets' owners Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, $425M from Citigroup...........among others.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The Senate will soon issue findings of a probe of the US mortgage meltdown that fueled the global financial crisis, with Goldman Sachs likely to face fresh embarrassment over its role, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, whose high-profile inquiry commission subpoenaed Goldman's and other executives last year, is due to release its report on the subprime implosion of 2007 and 2008. The paper, citing people familiar with the matter, said the report was expected to release emails from securities firms that developed or sold subprime mortgages and financial vehicles including...

Saul Katz, Fred Wilpon's BIL, co-founder of Sterling Equities, and Mets co-owner, will repeatedly tell you he is a CPA........the brains behind Sterling's investment portfolio and business operations.....in charge of all the family finances invested with Madoff. And yet the investment pro, claims he had no knowledge that Madoff was running a Ponzi. Katz took out over $120M just in the last six years. Katz's three sons, who work for Sterling Equities, snared more than $237M. Katz married Wilpon's sister, Iris, more than 50 years ago and in 1972 went into business with Fred.

The anti-government “throw-the-bums-out” crowds have had their chance to speak out on how to curtail the deficit and what to do with those hated entitlements that are the antithesis of the America they pine for. A recent WSJ/NBC News poll provided a glimpse of just how dependent on big government entitlements Americans have become–even among the Tea Party. Not that this should be a surprise to anyone watching the slow shift of the American mindset from citizen, to consumer, to ward of the State over the past century. According to the Wall Street Journal who co-sponsored the poll, “Americans across...

Duchess of York admits Duke arranged for convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein to pay off her debts The Duchess of York has admitted that her former husband arranged for a convicted paedophile to pay off her debts.

Chairwoman Mary Schapiro's general counsel is accused of having a conflict of interest in the Madoff affair that Schapiro knew about. Two influential congressional leaders are directly challenging Security and Exchange Commission Chairwoman Mary Schapiro as a new Bernard Madoff scandal engulfs the agency, this one involving charges of conflicts of interest by her own general counsel. Pajamas Media has obtained a copy of the letter sent to the SEC chairwoman. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) today sent a sharply worded joint letter to the SEC chief, demanding she explain why the she appointed General Counsel...

NEW YORK (AP) -- Wall Street swindler Bernard Madoff said in a magazine interview published Sunday that new regulatory reform enacted after the recent national financial crisis is laughable and that the federal government is a Ponzi scheme. "The whole new regulatory reform is a joke," Madoff said during a telephone interview with New York magazine in which he discussed his disdain for the financial industry and for its regulators. ... Madoff did an earlier New York Times interview in which he accused banks and hedge funds of being "complicit" in his Ponzi scheme to fleece people out of billions...

Bernard Madoff has admitted that running the biggest financial fraud in history was a "head trip" as some of the world's biggest banks threw money at him to manage. "The chairman of Banco Santander came to see me, the chairman of Credit Suisse came down, chairman of UBS came down," Mr Madoff told the New York Magazine in an interview. "It feeds your ego. All of a sudden, these banks which wouldn't give you the time of day, they're willing to give you a billion dollars." In an in-depth interview conducted over 12 telephone calls from his prison in North...

Bernard Madoff, the disgraced financier, accused the investors whose money he lost in a £40 billion Wall Street investment fund of being greedy. 'Everyone was greedy,' Bernard Madoff told New York magazine.'I just went along' Photo: AP Madoff, who is serving a 150-year prison sentence, also rubbished the financial reforms introduced by the US to prevent future corruption and claimed: "The whole government is a Ponzi scheme". He added: "These banks and these funds had to know there were problems". "It was a nightmare for me," he said. "Even the regulators felt sorry for me ... They said 'how did...

Bernard L. Madoff is in therapy. Each week, he waits for the signal that prisoners are allowed to leave their housing units, then he walks the five minutes from his “room,” as he calls it, to the psychiatric unit at the Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, North Carolina, where he can unburden himself. The sessions are often teary. “How could I have done this?” he asks. “I was making a lot of money. I didn’t need the money. [Am I] a flawed character?” In some ways, Madoff has not tried to evade blame. He has made a full confession, telling...

Citigroup saw several red flags in the dealings of Bernard Madoff's firm years before his multibillion-dollar fraud was exposed in late 2008, the firm's liquidator said in a newly unsealed lawsuit. Irving Picard, a court-appointed trustee seeking to recover money for former Madoff clients, made the accusations in one of several complaints he has filed against big banks he says "enabled" the massive, decades-long Ponzi scheme by turning a blind eye to it. "Citi had access to and received information placing it on inquiry notice that Madoff's advisory business was potentially a fraud, and/or that Madoff was making hundreds of...

We are at the beginning of the most consequential domestic conflict the United States has fought since the Civil War. Like the battle between the Blue and Grey, this one is for the continued existence of the country. Today’s weapon of choice might be the legislative pen and the protest sign and there may not be blood flowing in the streets, but make no mistake, the stakes are exactly the same: The survival of the nation as we know it. If that sounds like hyperbole, think about the German inflation of the 1920’s or Zimbabwe today. At some point taxpayers...