Bongiorno “never understood that she was involved in a fraud,” Riopelle.
Party Photo
He showed the jury a photograph of his client when she was 19 years old, standing with other Madoff employees in the 1960s at a party and smiling widely. Another photo displayed on jurors’ flat-screen monitors featured Madoff in a plaid shirt on horseback in 1988. Riopelle said his client kept that image for a decade.
“She looked up to Mr. Madoff. She believed in Mr. Madoff. She saw him as a kind of hero,” he said. “While he wasn’t quite her knight in shining armor, he was her knight in plaid.”
Schwartz told the jury that O’Hara and Perez in 2006 confronted Madoff and sought to extort more pay out of him after they realized their programming codes -- which allowed the firm’s computers to “spit out fake paperwork” -- were essential to keeping the fraud going. Madoff gave the men $100,000 each as “hush money” and let them name their own annual bonuses and salary increases, the prosecutor said.
O’Hara’s lawyer, Gordon Mehler, yesterday told the jury there was no extortion and that O’Hara and Perez had a “courageous confrontation” with Madoff after becoming uncomfortable with some of the code they were working on. They expected to be fired and were “relieved” when Madoff accepted their concerns, Mehler said.
‘Never a Crook’
“O’Hara was never a crook,” Mehler said.
Perez’s lawyer, Larry Krantz, said the computer programmers became uncomfortable with the codes they were being asked to write because they feared they could be misused. He had no idea the codes were being used for deception and Madoff -- a “financial god” -- never told them, Krantz said.
“He couldn’t have been told these things because these things were deep, dark secrets,” Krantz said. Those secrets were only told to Madoff’s “inner circle” and the “tech guys” weren’t in that group, he said.