Madoff Employee Breaks Silence

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Looking back, he speculates that the faked statements were essentially done manually. He thinks two people did research as to what a blue-chip stock historically traded for and a similar price was chosen and the fake trades entered into a computer, the statements printed out and sent to unsuspecting clients. “I wonder whether everyone’s statements were basically the same, just varied a bit, because if they weren’t that would be a lot of work for the employees down there.”

Annette Buongiorno’s unit was in a separate part of the office. Two assistants who worked for her have reportedly told investigators that they were told to help generate the false trades.

“Everything had to be black. The computers, the tables, even the picture frames. If he saw a kid’s picture in a silver frame, for instance, he would order the offender to get a black frame.”

The firm’s odd way of being run was chalked up to Bernie’s quirkiness. “We just thought he was a brilliant eccentric man.” The 17th floor, for instance, to the shock of the employee, was messy. Papers strewn on desks, people in jeans, a sense of organized chaos.

BERNIE, ‘OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE’
“Yet take the 18th-and 19th-floors: Bernie was obsessive compulsive about the floors where the legitimate businesses were,” he said. “Everything had to be black. The computers, the tables, even the picture frames. If he saw a kid’s picture in a silver frame, for instance, he would order the offender to get a black frame. If you had a jacket over the back of your chair, he would take it off. He went down the row of windows and made sure that the slats were all at the exact same angle. You couldn’t have any paper on your desk.“

“I had these huge cheap gray headphones and Mark said to me ‘Those headphones are gray and you can’t wear them.' So he bought me these expensive pair of Bose.”

“Now that I look back on it, I wonder whether he wanted the proprietary and market-making businesses to appear perfect, to create the impression that they was really profitable and legitimate.”

Why was the messy 17th floor so antithetical to Bernie’s weird passion for neatness and uniformity? "Maybe he just didn’t care,” said the employee, “as long as they did their job. He let Frank Di Pascali run it.” Di Pascali, a longtime Madoff employee, has reportedly refused to talk to investigators. “He was a very off-putting man,” the employee said. “Rough, not very friendly. He had a thick New York accent, not a very cultured manner. When we were at one of the Montauk beach parties, his son was there and he used the word ‘Guinea’ to describe him.”

Bernie was only around about half the year, according to the employee: “The other half he spent at his houses in France, Palm Beach, wherever he and Ruth landed.”

The 19th floor, where the employee worked, was where the proprietary-trading business was located. The 18th-floor stored all the trades and the emails, and of course the 17th floor was the nexus of the Ponzi scheme. “But the three businesses seemed comingled. There were two men on the 18th floor offices who I think knew what was happening,” said the employee. “They made huge salaries. The 17th floor not only produced the falsified statements, they did the accounting for our office on 19. Emails of both the legitimate and illegitimate businesses were handled and stored on the 18th floor.

What should have been a red flag, the employee said, was that the 17th floor’s statements detailing the financial output of his four-man computer unit often did not match what they calculated for themselves. “They screwed up a lot and were not technically sophisticated. And in that business, you have to be accurate, you have to know what you are doing.”

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