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Bernie Madoff, the notorious Ponzi schemer, says that he is dying from terminal kidney disease, and on Wednesday asked a judge to grant him an early release from prison on compassionate grounds so that he can live out his remaining days with a friend. A lawyer for Madoff, in a legal filing, says the fraudster has “less than 18 months to live,” and is suffering from “numerous other serious medical conditions” including cardiovascular disease and hypertension. On Thursday, a lawyer for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which prosecuted Madoff, filed a court document asking...

A fund-raiser for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and other Democrats who was charged last week with defrauding Citigroup also defrauded other banks, U.S. prosecutors said. The allegations against fund-raiser Hassan Nemazee—arrested last week on a bank fraud charge and released on $25 million bail—were not formal charges but were in a letter dated Tuesday from prosecutors to a Manhattan federal court magistrate judge handling the case. Nemazee, 59, head of a private equity firm, was accused on Aug. 25 of one count of bank fraud for seeking a fraudulent $74 million loan from Citigroup's banking unit. He said after his...

WASHINGTON -- The Securities and Exchange Commission tapped Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive Adam Storch on Friday to serve as the agency's first-ever chief operating officer of the enforcement division. The new hire represents the latest personnel change at the SEC in its effort to improve its operations following its failure to detect Bernard Madoff's massive Ponzi scheme. Enforcement Division Director Robert Khuzami created Mr. Storch's position of managing executive as part of the major re-structuring effort he announced earlier this year. Mr. Storch will oversee division operations that include budget, information technology and administrative services. He will also supervise...

Despite an issue with his heart, 77-year old Bernard Madoff is “doing as well as can be expected” serving a 150 year sentence at a federal prison in North Carolina, according to Ira Sorkin, the lawyer who represented him when he pleaded guilty to the largest financial crime in American history. “I think he’s had a little bout, little bit of a heart problem,” Sorkin told ABC News. Most troubling to Madoff, according to Sorkin and several inmates who served time with him, is that his wife Ruth stopped visiting him years ago and none of his grandchildren have come...

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,...

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, 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 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...

Besides Wilpon's personal relationship with Madoff---when the Mets negotiated larger contracts with star players — complex deals with signing bonuses and performance incentives — they sometimes placed deferred compensation with Madoff.....a strategy that allowed the Wilpons to make money for themselves. There was never much doubt: “Bernie was part of the business plan for the Mets,” a former employee said. Wilpon also encouraged friends to invest. A fellow LIRR commuter, Robert Tischler, came to own a piece of an apartment building with Wilpon and Wilpon’s BIL, Saul Katz. When they sold, Wilpon suggested he invest some of his profits with...

Bernard L. Madoff said he never thought the collapse of his Ponzi scheme would cause the sort of destruction that has befallen his family. 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...

The trustee liquidating Madoff’s asset management firm, has filed a complaint against JPMorgan Chase, claiming the bank had suspicions about Madoff’s Ponzi scheme going back to at least 2006, but waited until 2008 to alert authorities while it earned hundreds of millions of dollars from doing business with Madoff. The complaint seeks to recover nearly $1 billion in fees and profits, and an additional $5.4 billion in damages, for JPMorgan Chase’s decades-long role as primary banker for Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities’ (BLMIS), allegedly aiding and abetting Madoff’s fraud. “Incredibly, the bank’s top executives were warned in blunt terms about...

A high-level JPMorgan risk officer was warned that Bernie Madoff had “a well-known cloud” over his head and was suspected of running a Ponzi scheme nearly 18 months before he was charged, according to the FT. The lawsuit in which it's alleged that the executive was forewarned was filed against JPMorgan by Irving Picard, the trustee responsible trying to recover as many funds as possible for Madoff. It has just been unsealed, and was filed secretly at JPMorgan’s request. The suit aims at recovering $1 billion in fees and profits that JPMorgan earned as the primary banker to Madoff’s firm...

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...

When Bernie Madoff popped up in the news again last week, this time when it was alleged that his bankers at JP Morgan Chase saw red flags in his actions but failed to tell the authorities, I felt that familiar feeling again--nothing. Because I don't hate Bernie Madoff. Why should I? SNIP I shed no tears for Madoff, but nor do I clench a fist. Madoff didn't do anything to me. However, if I were forced to join an investment fund that I knew to be a Ponzi scheme and made to watch helplessly as my dollars were sucked out...

Mark Madoff, the older of Bernard L. Madoff’s two sons, was found dead in his Manhattan apartment on Saturday, the second anniversary of the day his father was arrested for running a gigantic Ponzi scheme that shattered thousands of lives around the world.

The Securities and Exchange Commission knew since 1997 that R. Allen Stanford likely was operating a Ponzi scheme but waited 12 years to bring fraud charges against the billionaire, the agency inspector general said Friday. An SEC enforcement official who helped quash investigations of Stanford's business later legally represented him... The findings were the latest in a string of black eyes for the SEC, following a series of reports issued by Kotz's office last year that chronicled in detail how the agency bungled five investigations of financier Bernard Madoff's business between June 1992 and December 2008.

PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) - Jeffry Picower, a Florida philanthropist alleged to have extracted billions from Bernard Madoff's investment scheme, drowned in his pool Sunday, police said. He was 67. The former New York lawyer and accountant had been a friend of Madoff for decades. A statement from Palm Beach police said Picower's wife and a maid found the body at the bottom of the pool Sunday afternoon and rescue workers could not revive him. Picower was transported to Good Samaritan Medical Center where he was pronounced dead at about 1:30 p.m.

Many of Bernard Madoff’s victims have moved beyond the jailed Ponzi schemer himself and targeted their anger toward the trustee and investigators charged with uncovering and distributing Madoff’s ill-gotten assets. That anger has only sharpened now that federal prosecutors have filed papers stating as many as half of Madoff’s customers at the time of his arrest didn’t actually lose any money because over the years they withdrew more cash from their accounts than they originally invested. In the same court filing, prosecutors told a judge there is no need to order restitution because all of Madoff's assets will be distributed...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Wall Street swindler Bernard Madoff has told fellow prison inmates that he is dying of cancer, the New York Post reported Monday, citing unnamed prison sources. Madoff, 71, who since June has been serving a 150-year sentence at a North Carolina federal prison, has been telling inmates that he does not have long to live, the newspaper said, citing the unofficial and unusual sources. One inmate at the Butner (North Carolina) Medium Federal Correctional Institution said Madoff was taking "about 20 pills a day" and "not doing very well," the Post wrote. Federal Bureau of Prisons...