HOT OFF THE PRESSES, He’s going to jail !!!
Tonight---------Oh, God I hope it hurts !!!
San Francisco Chronicle article (no registration required).
Sentencing is set for June 16.
Annie does Happy Dance while using her Nelson Muntz voice: HA-ha
I don’t hope it hurts; I hope he gets whatever he needs, from counseling to a whack in the face, so that he learns not to do it again and maybe makes some sort of restitution. If he can’t learn, then at least he’ll be isolated.
I think real justice would be for him to live out his days on minimum wage. Anything that he makes over and above that is confiscated as a fine.
I think the people who he swindled would like to get their money back. They should start selling off his assets, and I think someone needs to take a good look at his wife’s involvement.
No point in his learning not to do it again; he’s going to spend the rest of his life in jail.
And he’ll probably wheel and deal in prison. I bet within six months he’s knee-deep in cigarettes and bitches.
Prison Warden: Madoff won’t like Thursdays.
I don’t want to ruin your fun, folks, but I find it a bit disgusting when people wish for another to be sexually abused.
If we were to make sexual abuse an explicit part of the prison sentence, it would get an Eighth Amendment smackdown mighty fast. Frankly, as it stands, many prison systems are over this line, IMHO, because they don’t do enough to prevent it.
And any reform of the system runs into a pack of idiots who feel that these people got what they deserved, including rape.
I agree, except for the “a bit” part. There’s no way the people this guy screwed are going to be repaid in any significant way, he was never going to do it again anyway, his apologies were halfhearted at best (he’s sorry he got caught after a few decades, but still tried to hide his valuables), and killing or raping him wouldn’t fix it. It sucks and I’m glad he’s in jail.
At this point the most society could get out of Madoff is to have him be an example to others. Instead of forty years of living as a multi-billionare by fucking people over, maybe people can remember that he did eventually get caught and spent his final years in prison. Maybe retire “Ponzi” and rename these kind of scams a “Madoff”.
In any event, there is no way to get restitution, his personal finances don’t NEARLY cover it, and he wouldn’t have the opportunity to do it again, even if he tried. At this point the only benefit to society for having him locked up is to show that you can’t fully get away with this kind of thing. I think they should bring down a few others too because I can’t believe he did this completely on his own. His daughter, who married a SEC investigator, should be looked at quite closely.
Enjoy,
Steven
I still maintain that his whole family is nothing but a gang of grifters, albeit successful one.
I normally don’t enjoy the thought of anyone being physically brutalized, especially sexually. But this morning when I heard the news I was just so joyful as I was graphically imaging what I hoped might be in store for him tonight…I almost went to the pit just so I could share some of the more graphic details of what I hoped was in store for him. (Yes, I know they probably won’t put him in with the general population but let me have my dreams.)
Then I realized the last time I felt this way. It was when I read this article right after 9/11.
And I do think the crimes are comparable. OK, so Madoff’s crimes were much less dramatic and not so many people died.
But the financial damage from Madoff’s crimes was worse, even if you include the actuarial value of the lives lost.
But he did more damage to the Jewish community than any Arab terrorist could ever dare to hope to achieve and Bin Laden is probably creaming himself over the amount of money he took from Jewish philanthropic organizations…including, I’m sure, money intended to fight terrorism.
I really wish there was a way to ensure that all of Madoff’s fellow prisoners are educated as to what he did to the JEHT foundation and the Innocence Project.
Is that true if you accept a more reasonable definition of the fraud? I don’t buy this premise anyway, but I’m curious.
I looked into this a few months ago, I THINK the number I found for the WTC attacks was 50 billion. I don’t have time to look for the cite now but I will look around tomorrow morning and post something.
While the most common estimate of Madoff’s fraud is around $65 billion (because that’s the largest and therefore sexiest number), most of that figure is comes from the phony returns. The amount the investors lost is maybe a quarter of that amount.
I’m getting mighty damned suspicious over here. Where did the money all go, that its gone. I mean, even if you got yourself the Mother of all Cocaine Habits, supermodels, the whole nine years, its hard to spend billions on self indulgence. Millions, sure, even I could do that! But not billions. And there doesn’t seem to be vast tracts of real estate to be seized, or Renoirs and Rembrandts that can be auctioned off. The money appears, for the most part, to be just plain gone.
And that’s weird to me. Money is significant, people pay attention to money, its hard for money to just go poof!
I think somebody else got a metric buttload of bucks out of this. I will refrain from idle speculation and unfounded suppositions. But I’ll listen to yours, if you have such…
There aren’t billions to be had. Most of the money that was swindled was passed on to the other “investors,” that’s the nature of this scheme. Hundreds of millions, maybe, but Madoff insists he paid his staff, so you might have to take the costs of running his office out of there, too. He did have an exceptionally nice life and there was plenty of jewelry being mailed to relatives after his arrest. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had help. There’s just not that much money to recover.
Most of the money never existed, because it consisted of fictitious returns, all inflated by fictitious compound interest. All that ever existed was the principal money from investors, which was used to pay off the principal and fictitious investment returns to earlier investors. So that’s why nothing is left.
Since the fictitious investment returns were the product of fraud (akin to receipt of stolen property), even people who cashed out before the whole thing collapsed may have those returns seized by the government when they sort this all out (subject to statute of limitations). But there is simply not enough money to repay all of the lost principal, much less the fictitious returns.
Right. If he still has hundreds of millions in assets, I wouldn’t be stunned, but that’s still a single-digit fraction of what’s been taken. And it’ll probably take a long time to get at it, too.