From Prison, Madoff Says Banks ‘Had to Know’ of Fraud (NYT)

[somone]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/business/madoff-prison-interview.html

From Prison, Madoff Says Banks ‘Had to Know’ of Fraud
By DIANA B. HENRIQUES

BUTNER, N.C. — 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 only person involved... He spoke with great intensity and fluency about his dealings with various banks and hedge funds, pointing to their “willful blindness” and their failure to examine discrepancies between his regulatory filings and other information available to them. “They had to know,” Mr. Madoff said. “But the attitude was sort of, ‘If you’re doing something wrong, we don’t want to know.’ ”

While he acknowledged his guilt in the interview and said nothing could excuse his crimes, he focused his comments laserlike on the big investors and giant institutions he dealt with, not on the financial pain he caused thousands of his more modest investors. In an e-mail written on Jan. 13, he observed that many long-term clients made more in legitimate profits from him in the years before the fraud than they could have elsewhere. “I would have loved for them to not lose anything, but that was a risk they were well aware of by investing in the market,” he wrote.

Mr. Madoff said he was startled to learn about some of the e-mails and messages raising doubts about his results — now emerging in lawsuits — that bankers were passing around before his scheme collapsed. “I’m reading more now about how suspicious they were than I ever realized at the time,” he said with a faint smile...

[Skink]

1. Money laudering anyone?

[bettyellen]

2. he is full of shit, his sons and niece were the ones who had to know at first

it was their jobs to look at the business. the banks should have looked harder too, but really the family is not, and should not be off the hook.

[nashville_brook]

3. i heard from a little bird of some investigations that have been dragging on for

years, looking into fraud on the banks' end of things. "dragging on for years" is the operative phrase here.