Bernie Madoff Victims Continue To Surface

The tally of reported losses climbed through the weekend to nearly $20 billion, with a giant Spanish bank, Banco Santander, reporting on Sunday that clients of one of its Swiss subsidiaries have lost $3 billion. Some of the biggest losers were members of the Palm Beach Country Club, where many of Mr. Madoff's wealthy clients were recruited.

The list of prominent fraud victims grew as well. According to a person familiar with the business of the real estate and publishing magnate Mort Zuckerman, he is also on a list of victims that already included the owners of the New York Mets, a former owner of the Philadelphia Eagles and the chairman of GMAC.

Read the whole story here.

Comments

[jpmdevildog]

PhD Ape is doing a mitzvah and counseling the Palm Beach victims.

http://www.weeklyworldnews.com/mutants/phd-ape-to-counsel-scam-victims/

[loki]

of course the ivy greeders will be jumping on board. THey smell tax payer bail out coming. Im surprised the Big 3 automakers are not announcing they were heavily invested in this too.

[GerryS]

I have a $5 that says Bernie does no jail time----------

[mrcontinental]

All of Wall Street is a ponzi scheme, you ain't seen nothing yet folks. It gets worse.

[jsarets]

Money itself is a Ponzi scheme. It cannot exist without exponential growth, and new money is necessary to pay the interest on old money. That's the textbook definition of a Ponzi scheme. So any transaction that uses money as an exchange medium is inherently a part of an unsustainable scam that will inevitably bankrupt everybody except the international bankers, who will come away owning the vast majority of private property.

[suzc]

But how the heck can ANYone SPEND $50 BILLION??? That money MUST be SOMEwhere! It's CASH he stole! Not stocks he inflated. So where is the money????

[bascombe]

the bailout for the bankers started at $700Billion. how much of it was to cover this ponzi scheme and others like it?

[jsarets]

As the saying goes, you can't cheat an honest man. Even the little old Jewish lady playing Mahjong at the Palm Beach Country Club was at best hoping for too-good-to-be-true profits from doing absolutely nothing of any value. An honest person doesn't participate in get-rich-quick schemes. If you can't explain what you're doing to earn these profits, then the profits are dishonest.

We have a toxic culture of private investment that markets the idea that instead of working for money, we can have money work for us. It's a Ponzi scheme, and it will blow up over and over again until we learn that money only works for bankers, and everybody else works for them.

My uncle insisted a few years ago that I read "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" and then talk to him about managing my finances. I reported back that the real estate scheme promoted in the book was unsustainable, that it would stop working and probably backfire if too many people tried it, which was quite likely given the popularity of the book and the growing trend of upper-middle-class families such as my uncle's flipping real estate as a supplementary income. He was frustrated with me and claimed I just didn't get it, just didn't have the right mindset. Well, now he's frustrated for a different reason.

People think they can beat the banks. But the house always wins.

[Lupin77]

I understand that there are other companies operating similar hedge fund investments in the country. Guess we will be hearing soon that others are broke too.

[MoxieGurl]

Welcome to the poor house suckas!!!!!

[JBS]

It's a list of CO-CONSPIRATORS

[kirkland]

No Way that Madoff managed this himself and no way that 50 billion have disappeared.
It stretches credulity to imagine for 1 minute that Madoff himself managed to orchestrate this. A woman that i know ( not a socialite but a hard working person ) who lost over 1MM received up to forty pages A WEEK from Madoff indicating trades on her behalf. The SEC better dig and dig DEEP because this involves more PEOPLE. And money now off shore.

[LondonTownNY]

Madoff and sons should receive the Death Penalty

[satyriasis]

Palm Beach Country Club? LMAO. That's where Rush and other Republican bigwigs hang out and laugh at middle class suckers that they dupe. Looks like they got a taste of their own medicine.

[nomadicexpat]

i am really tired of reading ill-informed and offensive posts around this topic. i think if you look into it that Rush is not a member of PBCC, as it is a predominantly jewish club catering to a very different clientele than the one you describe

there is a lot of joy being taken on here at the misery of others. not all rich people are the scum implied by the posts here. the majority of those well off in this country are people who educated themselves, saved, invested wisely and contributed to society. there is this sense being propagated that anyone with assets is a thief and should be in jail. it is ill informed, inflammatory and upsetting

show a little compassion for your fellow man. a 75yr old man isnt going to be able to find a job after a crook stole his lifes work, a family shouldnt have to send their kid to community college because someone ripped off the college fund and a charity shouldnt be forced to shut it's doors because of this one man.

yes the returns offered were high and the methods opaque, but this wasnt some bucket shop ... i dont see greed here (on the part of the investors), i see theft

[kirkland]

How refreshing to read a humane post about this. WHY the media is NOT reporting all the middle class people who lost their LIFE SAVINGS ( all having about a 20 year relationship with Madoff ) with him infuriates me. The fund to fund investors and other instituional investors stand a better chance of being made *whole*. It's almost like the media wants us to have NO sympathy for the now wiped out investors. Perhaps because the SEC was so negligent and they're trying to protect larger interests? I don't get it.

[joycehelene]

Why do people fall for Ponzi Schemes? I guess it is just plain old greed, it will be always be with us and sooner or later it will rear its ugly head up again and a lot of smart and dumb people will again be fooled.

[Sundialsvc4]

High Crime has many victims.

For many years, the SEC was quite content to aid-and-abet this massive criminal fraud, refusing to take action, and in fact squelching the efforts of lesser officials to do so.

Do we have any idea how many "dollars" this particular High Crime has cost? Not yet.

Pursuant to Article 2, Section 4 of the Supreme Law of the Land, "any civil officer" (not just the Pres or the Veep) "SHALL BE Impeached." "High crime" or "misdemeanor," illegal conduct in violation of their oath of office was not to be tolerated.

One freakin' HAND-WRITTEN SENTENCE.

Do we, at long last, understand how utterly important that "one hand-written sentence" is?

Do we understand well enough to ... ENFORCE it?

[microcosm]

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