Alphonse D'Amato, former GOP senator from NY, knows a crook when he sees one. From the Southwest Sewer District to Mitchell Field to Wedtech to Stratton Oakmont, there were few financial scandals on Long Island in the last thirty years Senator Al wasn't involved in.

I busted out laughing when I read his 1/7/09 op-ed piece in the Long Island Businss News.

Senator Al nails it:

"Supposedly, Mark and Andrew, in a state of shock and disbelief, claimed to know nothing of their father's shenanigans, and turned him in to the federal government. To tell you this smells is an understatement. I find it ludicrous to believe that Madoff's sons, who worked with their father every day, were not aware of what was going on. We are told to believe that working alone, Madoff was able to manage billions of dollars, sending out fraudulent statements to thousands of investors, and was able to keep his sons who worked alongside him from knowing about his illegal activities. Maybe the Securities and Exchange Commission would fall for that story but I believe this is nothing more than a scheme to try and shield his sons from their culpability.

In 1996, the Securities and Exchange Commission fell for Senator D'Amato's story that he made $37,125 in a single day by trading honestly in the stock market.

(Ironically, D'Amato was conducting the Whitewater investigation at the time which encompassed Hillary Clinton's big score in the commodities market.)

Few people know Jordan Belfort, Senator Al's "stockbroker", testified in court in 2000 that he lied when he told the Senate Ethics Committee he did not arrange D'Amato's stock windfall. In his testimony, Belfort said he arranged the deal on D'Amato's request.

 10/26/00 Newsday story by Susan Harrigan and Graham Rayman:

"D'Amato Probe Called A Whitewash / Original complainant says committees protect senators",

In the wake of pump-and-dump boiler-room king Jordan Belfort's claim that he lied to the Senate Ethics Committee during the 1996 probe of former New York Sen. Alfonse D'Amato, the man who filed the original ethics complaint against the senator blasted the committee for failing to thoroughly investigate the allegations.

"It was pretty clear that there was never much of an investigation into the complaint," said Gary Ruskin, director of the Congressional Accountability Project, which initially filed allegations in June, 1996, over D'Amato's one-day $37,125 stock-market killing. The trades were made by Belfort's firm, Stratton Oakmont, a notorious Lake Success-based stock brokerage. "The biggest lesson of this is that both the Senate and House ethics committees does not investigate corruption. They are set up to protect senators."

Belfort testified Tuesday in the federal money-laundering trial in Brooklyn of former Stratton Oakmont accountant Dennis Gaito that he lied when he told the Senate Ethics Committee he did not arrange D'Amato's stock windfall. In his testimony Tuesday, he said he arranged the deal on D'Amato's request.

Belfort had also told federal investigators he arranged the D'Amato stock trade after he was indicted on securities-fraud and money-laundering charges in September, 1998, as part of negotiations over a plea agreement, according to documents. Belfort pleaded guilty to fraud charges last year.

In September, 1996, the Ethics Committee found no wrongdoing on D'Amato's part. D'Amato spokeswoman Lisa Dewald said yesterday, "The perjured testimony of a self-confessed swindler has absolutely no credibility. The SEC, as well as the Senate Ethics Committee, did investigate this matter and found no inappropriate conduct on the part of the senator...Everything the senator did was right and proper."...

Here on Long Island, government is so corrupt, we named the new and very expensive federal courthouse in Central Islip after Alphonse D'Amato instead of putting him in it.

Stealing from the taxpayer must be an art passed down from one generation of Paulsons to the next. While Henry M. Paulson Jr., former chairman of Goldman Sachs, has been busy lining his bank account with Treasury and Fed cash*,  his son, H. Merritt Paulson III, has been sending Oregon state officials on lavish junkets to NY so they will lay out $85 million for his bullshit soccer stadium.

You can get an idea of how much money Hank Paulson Jr. stole from Goldman Sachs shareholders by the fancy name his son goes by. H. Merritt III - gag me, puhl-eeze. No surprise "H. Merritt III" married a "Heather", is there? 

(Heather Lynn Paulson nee Mahar either went to the University of Michigan or was first in her class at Cornell as per her 10/2/05 NY Times wedding announcement.) 

A sadly underreported but hilarious bit of Paulson family trivia is about the time Heather Lynn did a Rosie Ruiz when she was a contestant on "The Amazing Race" (CBS 2006-10-01. No. 3, season 10). Thanks to an honest cameraman, Heather Lynn got nabbed taking a cab when she was supposed to be walking.

Read the 990s filed by the Goldman Sachs Charitable Fund - EIN 31-1678646 to get an idea about what constitutes good deeds in Henry Paulson's mind. The fund ostensibly was set up in 2001 to provide approximately $300k annually in scholarships to eligible minority students. 

But in 2004, the Goldman Sachs Charitable Fund received a contribution of $35 million from "HWY LLC", a Delaware corporation, in the form of ecologically important property on the island of  Tierra Del Fuego on both the Chilean and  Argentinan sides. The GS Charitable Fund tuned around and donated the land to the Wildlife Conservation Society that same year. 

Coincidence or not, H. Merritt Paulson III became a trustee of the Wildlife Conservation Society in 2005, thus enhancing his resume in time for his New York Times wedding announcement.

How HWY LLC came to own valuable timberland which probably should belong to the people of Chile and Argentina was not disclosed in either the Goldman Sachs Charitable Fund nor  the Wildlife Conservation Society 990s. 

Would anyone be surprised if Henry M. Paulson, Goldman Sachs chairman, laundered $35 million for an Argentinian or Chilean general who disappeared people and then took a tax deduction for his "good deed"?  

More to come.

* If he objects to my characterization of him, Henry Paulson can disclose his and his family's financial holdings publicly. If he and his family are not benefitting from the biggest taxpayer ripoff in history, I will retract my statement. Paulson made a big deal out of divesting his Goldman Sachs stock before he took the Treasury job but it looked more like insider trading to me.

Given that Bernie Madoff supposedly stole billions of dollars, nobody knows where the money went and the Madoff family ran the business, you'd think the DOJ and the SEC would be doing everything possible to keep the Madoffs and their money under lock and key.

Wrong.

Peter Barnett Madoff, Bernie's brother, is running around free as a bird and, for some reason, the NY media is not interested in the comings and goings of Bernie's brother. No profile in Bloomberg News or the WSJ, no speculation about his money, no nothing.

Hello? Peter Madoff is the chief compliance officer at Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC and he has been in business with Bernie since at least 1969.

Forty fucking years of working side by side with Bernie and Peter never guessed his brother was a crook? Unless Peter Madoff has an i.q. of  50 or less, he knows his brother is a crook. He's one, too.

The most recent Madoff Form ADV is available at the SEC Investment Advisor Search website.  Bernie's electronic signature on page 29 is dated 1/8/08 which presumably is the date the report was filed.

The report is false and that should matter.

Top of Form ADV:

False statements:

Item 5 C. To approximately how many clients did you provide investment advisory services during your most-recently completed fiscal year?

Reply: 11-25

Item 5 F. (1) Do you provide continuous and regular supervisory or management services to securities portfolios?

Reply: Yes

Item 5 F. (2) If yes, what is the amount of your assets under management and total number of accounts?

Reply:
US Dollar Amount: $17,091,649,696.00
Total Number of Accounts: 23

Peter Madoff, Chief Compliance Officer, knew that information was false. The bankruptcy trustee is sending out claims forms to 8,000 Madoff investors.

Under Schedule A, Bernard L. Madoff is listed as having been Sole Member/Principal since 1/1/01.  Peter Madoff is listed as having been Director of Trading/Chief Compliance Officer since 1969. Both Bernie and Peter are listed as control persons.

If the trading and the investment arms of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC operated under the same corporate umbrella, Peter Madoff had oversight responsibility for the investment arm's trading activity including the non-existent foreign exchange activity.  

I'm curious about what changes were made to the corporate structure of Bernie's business around 2000. Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC was only registered in NYS on 12/4/00. What name did Bernie operate under before then?

Wealthy and sophisticated people like Bernie Madoff don't just break down one day and confess to running a multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme. Maybe his sons did report Bernie to the FBI but it was part of an act set up to distract the public's attention away from the obvious - Bernie Madoff's family had to have been in on the fraud all along.

The Madoffs met with their high-priced and high-powered attorneys long before last month about how best to give it up. The Madoffs, I'm sure, have the goods on a lot of crooks on Wall Street and leveraged the information to their advantage.

Maybe the Bush administration came to an agreement with the Madoffs whereby Bernie takes the rap for the fraud, goes to prison for a few years and the rest of the Madoffs are off the hook and keep their money.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if Chuck Schumer and Joe Lieberman helped broker the deal for the Madoffs. In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Schumer pushed for Michael Mukasey to be AG so Mukasey could minimize fallout from the Madoff scandal.

No one in NY or DC wants to shake investor confidence in Wall Street by telling the investors the truth about corruption in the US financial markets. Bernie, Peter and the rest of the Madoffs are counting on it.

Read this 8/23/04 New York magazine article, "Extreme Brand Loyalty", about Shana Madoff Swanson and then try to argue Shana Madoff had the moral backbone to turn her father and uncle in to the SEC if she knew they were committing fraud.  

No way in hell was Shana Madoff Skoller Swanson ever going to voluntarily give up her fabulous lifestyle for the sake of integrity.

Ask Shana Madoff, the compliance officer, whether she knew the SEC report filed by Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC at the end of 2006 was false. That was the report in which Madoff claimed it had $17 billion in investments under control on behalf of 20 or so clients. Shana Madoff would have known that was a lie because a lot more than 20 people have told her over the years how happy they were with their Madoff investments.

Name dropping and wearing the right designer clothes are what matters to Shana Madoff. She picked Narcisco Rodriguez (great name, btw) as "her" designer because she saw Carolyn Bessette Kennedy wearing his stuff.

Catch the bit about being on a Georgica beach when she noticed a must-have Prada handbag in Harper's Bazaar? I wonder if she or the Madoff family own property in East Hampton. I bet Martha Stewart, who has a house on Georgica Pond,  has the dirt on the Madoffs or she can get it. If the Madoffs screwed around with Martha's stock price, they are in big trouble now.

Me, I'd track down Joan Hamburg, the First Lady of WOR Radio, if I was investigating the Madoffs. I listen to Joan whenever I'm not working and I am telling you she knows everything about everyone in NYC and she has a house in the Hamptons.

I don't know what the deal is with Shana Madoff's second husband, Eric Swanson. Maybe he really is a honest guy who fell for a glamorous lifestyle in NYC. I'm curious about whether his father-in-law put up any money in the BATS deal. No one has said much about BATS recently. Then again, no one has said much about Primex and NASDAQ Europe, twojoint ventures between the Madoffs, Goldman Sachs and other brokerage firms.

It looks like Scott Koller, Shana Madoff's first husband, when into business in Boca Raton in 12/07 but the business, "Bodyssey Inc." now appears to be defunct. The company was registered by a Trina Skoller. Maybe Scott Koller remarried.

I wonder if Shana Madoff's designer clothes get auctioned off if she is found guilty of colluding with her uncle and father to commit securities fraud.

9/2/00 Newsday - Former crime boss Anthony Corallo, has died in a federal prison hospital in Springfield, Mo., while serving a 100-year term for racketeering. Corallo, 87, known as "Tony Ducks," had been convicted on the basis of wiretapped conversations that led to a spectacular series of La Cosa Nostra trials...

Last winter 's newsletter from the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System Foundation is inadvertently hilarious. Both Maurice "Sonny" Cohn and Thomas Gambino are lauded for their generous contributions to North Shore-LIJ on the front page.

Pretty easy to be generous when you steal the money in the first place.

Thomas Gambino, of course, is the son of famed mobster, Carlo Gambino. His wife, Frances, is Tommy Lucchese's daughter. Gambino is a gangster in his own right and controls a lot of the trucking in NYC. Oddly enough, Gambino  claimed  he was swindled by his personal stockbroker, Maurice Gross, when he did a stretch in prison a few years ago. He ordered Gross to invest his ill-gotten gains conservatively while he was in the big house and Gross didn't listen.  

On the other hand, no one has yet accused Maurice Jay "Sonny" Cohn of racketeering despite that fact that Sonny Cohn and Bernard Madoff have been business partners for more than forty years.

You had to be quick to catch the news but North Shore-LIJ reported losing "several million" in the Madoff scandal. But no one at North Shore-LIJ has elaborated any further.  

Madoff and Cohn are currently partners in Cohmad Securities Corporation which operates out of Madoff's office on the 18th floor at 885 Third Ave. Peter B. Madoff, Marcia Beth Cohn, Milton Cohn, Rosalie Buccellato and the beleagured Robert M. Jaffe are also partners in Cohmad.

Cohmad Securities was formed in 1985. In a recent 990 filed with the IRS, the Madoff Family Foundation reported that Cohmad held several million dollars of the foundation's investments.

Cohn and Madoff go back to a brokerage firm active in the '60s named Cohn Delaire  and Kaufman. The Delaire, Alfred J. Delaire, died in 1968. His son, Alfred J. Delaire Jr., was with the firm's successor, S. G. Warburg and now works for Cohmad.

There have been rumours of Delaire's wife, Carol, and her relatives being involved in stock fraud. (See the comments.) 

S. G. Warburg is not a member of FINRA and no information about the firm is provided by FINRA other than some details about NASDAQ violations.

I can't believe Maurice "Sonny" Cohn didn't know Bernie Madoff was a crook after working with him on Wall Street for more than forty years.

If Maurice Cohn did collude with Bernie Madoff, he should packed be off to prison just like Tommy Gambino. Bust the Cohn trusts and make the family live on the median income of a family of four in Nassau County.

Undermining the financial safety of 300 million Americans is a threat to our national security.  

The way I see it, Rudy Giuliani almost singlehandedly destroyed New York City by fining Milken and Boesky a lousy $100 million each and shipping them off to country club prison for a couple of years. Wall Street saw the slap on wrist you get for stealing a few billion and it went on a 20-year crime spree.

Now I'm off to start my petition to get Allenwood shut down forever. We have a lot of excess prison capacity here in New York, thanks to Charlie Gargano, and the people upstate could use the business. How does a 100-year stint in Plattsburgh sound, Bernie?    

Bernie Madoff apparently did not disclose any new sources of cash to the Feds. But what about real estate? If the Feds ever get around to realizing Bernie's brother and thirty-year business partner, Peter B. Madoff, was in on the scam, they might want to take look at his holdings.

Craig Kugel, a long time Madoff employee, is involved in Essex Realty Development LLC, registered in NYS on 12/10/07 to an address at 34 Pheasant Run, Old Westbury. 34 Pheasant Run is one of Peter Madoff's primary residences along with a W. 53rd St apartment and a Palm Beach house.

While much has been made of Ruth Madoff, Bernie's wife, being sole owner of her Palm Beach estate, no one has said anything about Peter and Marion Madoff transferring ownership of their Palm Beach property solely to Marion in 11/06 which is probably when the Madoffs got serious about giving it up.

 [Photo removed at the request of Traders Magazine]

This is a photo of Marion Madoff (Peter's wife), David L. Kugel and Craig Kugel at a 4/29/99 Bernard L. Madoff Investment Services LLC client services party. (Traders Magazine)

1/18/09 Update: I knew I shouldn't have lifted the photo from Traders Magazine but I wanted people to look at it for a reason.

Traders Magazine has a lot of photos of the Madoffs and the Madoff staff throughout the years.  Here is the link to the one with Marion Madoff and the Kugels.   

David Kugel, I believe, is Craig's father. They both live in the same North Shore neighborhood on Long Island and they may be related to the Madoffs.

Madoff Technologies, L.L.C. was registered in NYS in 10/98 in care of Craig Kugel at 885 Third Ave.

In 2003, Craig Kugel was identified in another Trader Magazine photo as being with Primex Trading. Primex was registered as Primex Holdings, L.L.C. in NYS in 10/98. Primex is a joint venture between Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, Goldman Sachs and other brokerage firms and involves a digital trading auction which operates out of Bernie's 18th floor office at 885 Third Ave.

(Why everyone in ther media is so damned sure Primex and every other aspect of Bernie's business was run any more honestly than the investment arm is beyond me.)

More to come.