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To: Paul Senior who wrote (33584)	2/20/2009 8:55:28 PM
From: Broken_Clock	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 78763

Paul I have related this story here(SI) before. About 6 years ago I had a real estate investor I worked with that used to manage a San Francisco brokerage. I met him via referral from a reliable source so at first I took him at his word. He put a knife in my back over a large deal, costing me over a million clownbux. I had only recently discovered the power of google at the time and spent several hours googling him...and found one document from a federal court case. Here is a more recent finding. sec.gov I then went to the SEC and they refused to confirm whether he was licensed or not(they were protecting his civil rights, I was told). I found and contacted his parole officer through the federal prison system online data base and the FBI. His parole officer also defended him. despite the fact he was still proffering himself as an actively licensed securities dealer, not the FBI, not his parole officer, not the SEC cared a hoot. I even offered to wear a wire and bust his sorry ass and they all declined. To this day he is likely still out there lying and scamming. This guy assisted in selling $30,000,000 in fraudulent bonds to mom and pop investors(like churches with one or two million to invest for pensions). He did 9 months in a country club fed pen and came out to steal more without a second thought. Nothing surprises me anymore. edit. This is the original doc I found, or at least very nearly like it. ca6.uscourts.gov

To: Paul Senior who wrote (33584)	2/21/2009 6:27:34 AM
From: Madharry	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78763

I mentioned my astonishment to a friend about the SEC;s inability to discover this fraud and he that people at the SEC had to have been bribed. I guess we have been programmed to accept government incompetence as the answer as opposed to the more logical explanation- bribery. I believe an independent prosecutor should be appointed to investigate the SEC. I dont believe its possible to commit a scam on this scale without dozens of people being involved. Think about how many phony transactions had to be generated in the phony statements and how the phony books had to be balanced. I thought that because securities companies get this sipc insurance that they had to be routinely audited. I wonder what that audit disclosed and in what decade it was last done. For all we know Madoff might just be a figurehead who was simply doing what he was told. The more interesting question is where has all the money gone. One would think it would be fairly simple to account for, especially if none of it was lost in the stock market. Another interesting question to me is: if i am an innocent investor who invested with Madoff for years and cashed in my investment to buy say a house. Now its years later, how can someone compel me to return the profits from my madoff investment which was innocently made? does that mean that if an investor bought a stock and sold it for a profit like enron, subsequent investors in enron can go after the previous investors profits?

To: Paul Senior who wrote (33584)	2/21/2009 1:11:11 PM
From: Spekulatius	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78763

OT re Madoff - I am sure that some folks (employees) helped with the fraud. others did not help but did probably know about it. I am not sure about the traders. Besides his Ponzi investment operation he did run a legit(?) market making operation and the traders were probably working in the latter. Even though , those traders must have known about the investment operation and may have wondered why Madoff never did any trades for his clients? My guess is that most of the folks working there knew something was wrong (also not the extend of the fraught) but were paid to not ask any questions. Other folks must have helped him to keep the fake books, sent out fake statement to clients etc. there must have been a fake accounting system, customer service, computer programs calculating the fakes returns for clients etc. etc. It was an "industrial size" fraud operation -he cannot possibly done it all by himself.