Bernie Madoff: Ruth Madoff's Sister & Brother-In-Law File $11.4 Million Claim
On Friday, Robert and Joan Roman filed claims of $8.7 million and $2.7 million, respectively, in the Madoff bankruptcy case, according to PACER records. Joan Alpern Roman is Ruth Madoff's only sibling.
The $11.4 million probably includes profits earned and the amount of any money redeemed in prior years was not disclosed.
Some of Joan Roman's claim may represent the money she inherited from her parents which ABC News claimed was about $1 million. I don't know what her husband did for a living.
The Romans have three daughters who also had Madoff accounts, according to the BMIS customer list but they apparently chose not to file claims at this time. I was told that one of the daughters has had her house up for sale since December so their losses may have been significant.
The Romans may have gone public with their claims to put to rest any suspicion that they were not Madoff victims.
Coincidentally, the New York Times has an article today about Ruth Madoff, "The Loneliest Woman In New York." No word on how close Ruth and Joan are these days.
Note: The Romans appear to be avid croquet players, according to this article about the 2008 Mar A Lago Doubles Invitational.
The NYT profile is, well, odd. Human interest stories have a place in a great newspaper, but this doesn't even manage to cross that threshold. Who thought that this was worth a reporter's time? Or even a reader's?
On the other hand, keep digging, Mrs. P!
June 14, 2009 12:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
I agree with you and said so in a comment accidentally posted below.
June 15, 2009 9:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
Hey Mrs. P:
Didn't Ruth Madoff originally claim the Montauk, N.Y house was purchased with her own funds from her father's inheritance? Around the time of Bern's guilty plea?
Now, she is claiming the penthouse was bought with the Alpern inheritance?
So if Ruth split the inheritance with a sister, do you have any idea how much the estate was originally worth?
As always, I enjoy your research.
It is becoming more apparent every day how worthless the corporate news media is when a person like yourself, on your own time can out do the professional reporters and editors time and time again.
Thanks.
June 14, 2009 1:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
I thought it was an odd story, too. The NY Post had already covered the salon story so the NYT was just piling it on.
I bet Cynthia Lieberbaum was thrilled to be outed as one of Ruth's only friends who still talks to her.
June 15, 2009 9:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
Oops! The last post was supposed to be a reply to yellowdog.
To answer your questions, the Montauk house is in both Bernie and Ruth's names. I don't think Ruth claimed it as her own exclusively but I could be wrong.
According to ABC News, Ruth's mother, Sara, left three trusts to her husband, Saul when she died in 1996. Those trusts were worth $2 million and when Saul died in 1996, Ruth and Joan each got $1 million.
Interesting that the trusts were in Sara Alpern's name and not Saul's.
No one on line, as far as I know, has ever asked what Avellino & Bienes paid for Saul Alpern's business. According to a 1976 NYT story, Bienes was living in one of the most luxurious apartment buildings in NYC so they were raking in the big bucks even then.
I read somewhere that some or all of Ruth's municipal bonds were purchased in the '80s. If Bernie bought them for Ruth, he was already preparing for a worst case scenario.
June 15, 2009 9:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
Hello Mrs. P,
Ohhh I know where I read that:
"Feds Zero In on Bernie's Inner Circle"
by Lucinda Franks
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-03-16/feds-zero-in-on-bernies-inner-circle/
"Ruth claims a house in Montauk was given to her by her father in the early 80s, according to a federal source: "This is one of her recent fabrications."
The SEC's Cohmad actions are interesting...
June 23, 2009 11:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah, “odd” NYT profile, but some interesting tidbits about Mrs. M's status in the investigation:
* “Her lawyer, Peter Chavkin ... declined to comment and said that Mrs. Madoff would not comment, either.”
* Sources said “Mrs. Madoff had invoked the legal doctrine of marital privilege and declined to testify against her husband.”
* She “has not been charged with any crime or even questioned by prosecutors.”
The article does not explicitly say that she refused to talk to the feds. In fact, it implies that they aren't even seeking her testimony. Why not? She can use privilege to avoid testifying against Bernie, but not against the other insiders. (She was a director at the firm.) Bernie pleaded out without implicating anybody. They could use her cooperation as an inducement get him more favorable sentencing. Or immunize her and bring her in to the grand jury.
I don't trust this investigation. It seems like the Obama administration is continuing the Rove-Gonzalez DoJ and the Cox SEC, which could see-no-evil on Wall Street.
June 14, 2009 4:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
The other day, I read a couple of Newsday stories circa 1998 and 2002 about NASDAQ going public. They focused on Frank Zarb, former head of NASD and Bernie was quoted in both of them. In 2002, Zarb was a candidate to succeed Harvey Pitt.
Before heading NASD, Zarb was on the board of the Long Island Power Authority, a newly formed entity that took over Long Island's publicly held power company. Governor Pataki later appointed him to the Nassau County Finance Authority when Nassau County was on the verge of bankruptcy.
Zarb was the one who appointed Mary Schapiro from Babylon, Long Island to be the NASD's top cop after it was bagged by the Feds for big time price-fixing which was going on during Bernie's reign as chairman of NASD.
The stories reminded me about how many powerful people have a vested interest in keeping Bernie's secrets.
If Bernie was doing favors for those big real estate developers who were his customers, for example, those developers will use their very considerable political muscle to quash the investigation.
The SEC may say it is investigating whether the Madoff investigations were unduly influenced by Bernie or other outsiders but in reality, it doesn't want to be seen as helping cover up the biggest Ponzi scheme in history.
Mary Schapiro, of all people, doesn't want that to happen.
June 15, 2009 10:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
You certainly have a better handle on this than I do.
It's just that virtually everybody involved in this was a big fish. I'm afraid that the biggest fishes' interest in making this go away will outweigh the others' interest in being compensated or in seeing that justice is done.
My confidence was not increased by the feds' acceptance of Bernie's implausible plea allocution which claimed that no one else was involved.
June 15, 2009 1:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
In the VF article, Eleanor Squillari said Bernie had a couple of appointments with Ira Sorkin in the week preceding his arrest.
Wouldn't you love to know how many other times Bernie met with Sorkin in the last two or so years?
I've long wondered if Sorkin recommended Marc Mukasey to Frank DiPascali and when DiPascali first met with Mukasey.
Bernie and DiPascali were perfectly aware what the fallout would be when the Madoff fraud was exposed and the two of them have had years to prepare for it.
Maybe Bernie offered to take the life sentence and keep his mouth shut about what he knew about the bigshots on Wall Street and, in return, the Feds agreed to not prosecute the rest of the family.
DiPascali may be offering info on the feeder fund operators and in exchange, his family gets to keep his ill-gotten assets.
DiPascali strikes me as someone who might have some misplaced personal code of honor that would not permit him to rat out Bernie's relatives because he gave Bernie his word he wouldn't.
June 15, 2009 1:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah, Marc (son of Michael) Mukasey, from the firm Giuliani & al.
I think that you speculated a while back that the mob might be involved. That would explain the tight-lipped “code of honor” among some of the perps. But it wouldn't justify the feds enabling the omerta.
June 15, 2009 2:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
LOL - Yes, I did speculate about the mob being involved in Bernie's business. I still wonder if Ralph Mafrici, Madoff customer, is Ralph Mafrici, mafia hitman.
I wasn't the only one who speculated about Frank DiPascali being mobbed up. Bloomberg did everything but come out and say DiPascali was a mobster in its story about him.
This time, I really just meant that DiPascali came from the old school. I think it was his son who told someone at one of the company Montauk outings that his father was an old-fashioned guinea.
As an aside, a Clusterstock commenter early on claimed that DiPascali's neighbor said there were tough-looking bodyguard types hanging around the house last year but they might have just been Frank's friends.
I also speculated that the Israeli authorities looked into Bernie's biz when they began investigating one of Bernie's customers, Morris Talansky in 2006. Talansky was bagged a few months ago as having laundered money for his frined, Ehud Olmert. Talansky and the Israeli hospital he raised money for had several Madoff accounts. Talansky told Newsday he lost about a million.
I suppose it is unfair to accuse the Feds of being held hostage by Bernie. Six months isn't that long to conduct a investigation of a thirty-year old fraud. I just wish there were more juicy leaks.
BTW, David Kotz, the SEC inspector general just announced that he was going to issue three short reports about Madoff very soon. One of them will detail the SEC Madoff investigations conducted since 1992 and tell why they missed the fraud.
Google "madoff" to read the entire WSJ story.
June 15, 2009 4:59 PM | Reply | Permalink