Let me get this straight.....

Noel made $500 million himself simply funneling money to Madoff. No oversight, no due diligence whatsoever. Half a billion to just take a check and give it to Madoff.....

and we're debating his culpability?

What am I missing?

You could not make a better story in Hollywood. A man appeals to the vanity of these people, who in their ignorance, falsely believe that because of their privilege, they have some right to astronomical returns that defy any logic, only to find that their vanity has destroyed them and their families in the end. What a wonderful irony. I hope these fools in the Greenwich/Palm Beach set and their lawyers destroy what remains of their wealth in one final litany of lawsuits.

Two points here: One, it's amazing what people can do when they manipulate people's trust.

Two, there were obvious signs. But with all that money flowing in, why would people want to stop the gravy train? It's interesting to me how now everyone is pointing out all the "obvious" in your face warning signs, as if they suddenly popped up. They were always there. Let's get real, people.

Bernie, Madoff couldn't pull this off by himself. He had help. Let's start working our way out from the inside first. By this I mean that we need ot look at the wife and the kids. They knew what's up. If no one believes this then they believe the nonsense Voctoria Gotti enjoys telling, or tries to sell to the world....that she had nO iDEA what her father (John Gotti) was up to all these years, that she never knew herd addy was a gangster. Give me a break. There is no such thing asa secret.

There are no ifs or buts: either Walter Noel is an accomplice of a crime, or he's criminally incompetent. Period.

Are we truly debating the culpability of a person and firm, who, among the "best and brightest," in our nation could not see the "red flags," of an investment firm that turned out to be one of the biggest, if not biggest, Ponzi Scheme in the nation?
And why is the firm Fairfield Greenwich, among whom are the best and brightest, one of which was an SEC attorney, trying their damndest not to be prosecuted for aiding and abetting the very same Ponzi Scheme?
One has to wonder, who in the world, and hell, are these companies, the ones which funneled money to Mr. Madoff, are paying off to stay out of prison? Surely the rich and powerful must be held accountable to the same laws as the rest of us pee-ons?
In point of fact, no one is supposed to be above the law, if this proves not to be true then, the American public must be told and told loudly that there is a class of people that are not liable to the law and will not be held accountable for their misfeasance. Of course the "common people," which consists of most of the population of the US, if they tried to get away with something so audacious and outrageous, would
be slammed into handcuffs and leg irons, locked up and the floor of the prison, bolted shut for this very same thing.

I don't think there is anyway he did this alone however they need to set a floor on trying to get money back. If a small investor who knew nothing of the fraud took money out they should not be forced to give it back. For most it would mean taking all they have. Go after the people who made hundreds of millons from this for the money.

Where were all the "Financial Reporters" all those years that Madoff's funds were reporting 12% returns in both good & bad years???

Thanks, datruth, that is a good question.

As for the Noels, and all the other feeder funds, they either didn't want to ask questions for fear of the answers, or, grossly negligent.

They may never be prosecuted, but they will be tied up in litigation for at least a decade.

Proof of Noel's culpability: He funneled billions of other people's money to Madoff (raking in a quick 500mil for himself), but only gave 60 mil of his own funds to Madoff. C'mon.

Actually Barrons did run a piece in 2001 that hinted at impropriety - it's in their current issue. But nothing, of course, to reflect the scope of the actual debacle.

Where was the SEC? That Coxsie is doing one heck of a job.And with such a "steady hand"

Walter Noel and his skuzz daughters should 'do the right thing.'

Walter Noel might not be as big a crook as Madoff but you be sure he thinks his shit does not stink.

One man makes $500 million from Goldman Sachs and another makes $500 million from his hedge fund. There is a message there that I am missing.
Have we, the public, been left with a lot of worthless promissory notes in exchange for the billion dollars that went into their pockets?

I've had some of my brightest and best educated friends in California and Alaska in the '90s "invest" in Ponzi schemes run by high school graduates. The supposed details about the "investments" in which they dropped substantial amounts of their net worth were ludicrous. The "interest" rates they were ostensibly "earning" on their accounts were outrageous. Nothing could have made it clearer that they were a scheme any more than the supposed "interest" escalated substantially in the last stages before the schemes' total collapse. The persons with whom they were "investing" were spending lavishly and foolishly. But when I asked the friends why anyone supposedly with such a great business would come to them for money at 12% or 15%, when they could get it for much less from a bank, I was treated like the bearer of bad tidings. They had their "statements" after all, and treated them as real money. In each case when the schemes collapsed, many of the "investors" (a.k.a. "marks") blamed it on regulators or white collar crime investigators and prosecutors whom they believed simply caught the funds at a bad time and who had actually caused the collapse of a sound investment.

In Albania, not that many years ago, virtually the entire country was taken in by such a scheme.

I think it's a function of a widespread, innate human desire to believe in something that makes no sense as presented, whether it's "compassionate conservatism" or heaven.

Another puzzle here. Large investors normally use credit default swaps to insure their deposits at a % cost of the yield. None appear to have done this, why not?. Another scam was carried out by one Robert Maxwell in the UK , using the Daily Mirror newspaper pension fund in the 80�s. His reward for screwing the pensioners out of many millions was burial on the Mount of Olives. Of course his family claimed to know nothing of his corruption, as with Madoff�s family. Great people, one & all.

What's the essential difference between a Ponzi scam and a bunch of people inventing financial vehicles that nobody really understands and nobody can value and palming them off on other people, banks, hedge funds and other greedy guts?

Perhaps the real difference is that with the current Madoff Ponzi scheme, rich people are the ones who are getting hurt, and with the fake financial wizardry of the investment/mortgage and etc. bankers, it is in the long run all of us ordinary people who get hurt and whose tax money is being taken (by Paulson, one of the investment bankers) to further enrich the original culprits.

I am not and never was a millionaire but I too was robbed of my investments. eight years ago the investment firm hired by my Union was found guilty of stealing investments of the rank and file via a Ponzi scheme. Along with thousands of other Union members, I lost my entire 401k. Some lost those and their pension plans as well. This incident was given the honor of an article in The Wall Street Journal (The Capital Investment Scandal) and then nothing more was brought to the public's attention.

So why wasn't my name and the name of the thousands of others who lost everything mentioned at the time? Maybe it is because we were not heiresses, or multi-millionaires or famous people. So it wasn't glamorous enough to be written about by the media. We weren't newsworthy.We weren't notable.

But we carried on without whining to the press as so many wealthy people who have lost funds in the Madoff Scandal have. Because we knew no one would care. Well guess what, I don't really give a tinker's hoot about these rich folk either.
The only difference between them and us is that we are stronger and more resilient. Plus although some of us lost everything, we didn't have as much to lose. There is something to say for not being rich. You can't lose a million if you don't have it.

A couple of months ago I received a letter telling me the court case to recover some of the funds for a class action suit that was filed against the Union and the investment firm is finally going to be settled. We will all be getting a little of our funds back. I intend to go to Applebees with a couple of friends and treat them to a meal to celebrate. The amount I will be getting back will just about cover the cost of the meal.

datruth - ordinarily attacking the press would be legitimate - but in this case - not so much....

In (dec 16) 1992 the WSJ did a piece asking the question - How can Madoff get the returns he is getting? - and they didnt come up with an answer

and in May 2001 - Barrons wrote an article entitled "Dont Ask, Dont Tell" - which pretty much sums Madoff up.

"The press" did their job for the most part - Madoff isnt/wasnt the only story and two pieces like that should be a red flag to anyone with access to Google.

The penalties for this behavior are too lenient! Who did more damage someone who took a gun and robbed a liquor store and got $5000.00 and killed or injured no one or Bernie Maddof? Yet, the man who robbed the liquor store would be still in jain. Anyone who steals a million dollars should go to jail for 20 years and if he steals a billion dollars, he should go to the injection table. We have people committing suicide already from this... that makes it murder in my book.

Either way, is sounds like Mr. Noel is Royally Fucked.

There are many co-conspirators. How about Bernie's family?
Does anyone believe the two sons didn't know what Pop was doing??????????????????????????????????????????????

Oversight requires money, and there was nary a dime to be spent seeing that the fiduciary duty was being maintained, and the red flags spotted and investigated, and, if required, exposed and stopped. Mr. Noel is probably involved in the fraud up to this to his eyeballs. So are many other people. However, that does not make the vast majority of victims culpable simply because they believed the lie. While 10% annually is fairly unbelievable in some circles, some investors receive a compounded total of 10,000X on their investments legitimately, as did early investors in the Sonacare toothbrush (it took years, however). Even rich people like to think of themselves as smart. Lots of not so rich people were hurt, too. Support funding oversight. Please.

I won't be satisfied until I see Mr Noel and Mr Madoff along the side of the road in orange jumpsuits picking up trash... which is never going to happen....and that is why nothing will change...and the economy recovers there will be a whole new level of greed and more scumbags like Madoff & Noel & company to fill the void.

Mr. Noel, Madoff, et al deserve what they lost. They are a "golden in Greenwich" bunch of incompetent thieves.

But I do feel sorry for the people who trusted them and followed their advice because they were naive enough to believe that such unrealistic returns were possible. One of the most astute writers of human culpability, Jane Austen, often talked of investments and returns and wrote of living on "ten thousand a year at the four per cents". Four percent on conservative investments was reasonable then and still is, two hundred years later. It's a pity that some of the old money Maddoff and friends scalped didn't remember that.

It is hard to imagine the damage this man did to so many people, charities, etc. People trusted Madoff, and he promoted the money making aura around his enterprise. The question I have is this: did Bernie ever make any money, or was he a financial mis-manager from jump street?

Does he have $6000 shower curtains in his NYC digs? has he ever walked down the aisle in Wal Mart?