‘Too Intelligent’
“The Madoff brothers knew, saw and were simply too intelligent to plausibly feign ignorance about the fraud,” the trustee said in a revised complaint against the men last year. Even the market-making and proprietary-trading business units they ran were propped up with stolen money, according to the complaint.
On the second anniversary of his father’s arrest, Mark Madoff used a dog leash to hang himself from a pipe in the living room of his Manhattan apartment. Andrew Madoff died of cancer in 2014. Mark’s ex-wife, Susan Elkin, and his widow, Stephanie Mack, were earlier dropped from Picard’s suit under confidential terms, as was Andrew’s ex-wife, Deborah West.
Peter Madoff, the brothers’ uncle and a onetime compliance officer at the company, paid Picard $90 million after his guilty plea, while his daughter, Shana Madoff, another compliance officer at the firm, was dropped from the suit. Picard had accused them of spending client cash on credit card bills, vacations and their own business ventures.
The brothers deleted emails to obstruct a 2005 U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission probe that could have exposed their father’s fraud, according to testimony by Bernard Madoff’s longtime finance chief, Frank DiPascali. They included messages between the sons and other employees in which they discussed altering trading account information being given to the SEC, as well as the company’s true trading profits and losses, according to DiPascali, who pleaded guilty and testified against his former colleagues in the 2014 trial in a bid for leniency.
DiPascali died of lung cancer the next year.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.