Edited by: TJVNews.com
While the name of classic fraudster and big time ponzi scam orchestrator Bernie Madoff may not be dominating the headlines anymore, his notorious legacy lives on.
Madoff was apprehended by FBI agents in December 2008 and he subsequently died in jail at the age of 82 in 2021, but those who lost their life savings and whose lives were massively embittered by the scoundrel known as Madoff will never forgot his loathsome crimes. Over 40,000 investors were bilked and over $19 billion was stolen by the legendary miscreant.
As time passes, it appears that even more information about what motivated Madoff to commit these crimes emerges.
According to a recently published report in the New York Post, a new Netflix docuseries tells the rest of the Madoff story. According to Joe Berlinger, director of the four-part “Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street,” out Wednesday, Madoff had also been managing “a significant chunk” of money for international organized crime, the Post reported.
The Netflix series offers an explanation as to why Madoff put up little resistance to being held accountable for his heinous misdeeds and the 150 year jail term that was handed down to him, according to Berlinger, as was reported in the Post.
In an attempt to not be knocked off by the mob, Madoff’s guilty plea was just another selfish act on his part, the Post reported. Apparently, he had no remorse or the slightest compunction about what he had done to prominent personalities, celebrities and just ordinary folk who had entrusted him with their finances.
Speaking to the Post, Berlinger said, “People feel like one of the reasons he was so willing to immediately acknowledge his guilt, say it was all him, and go to jail wasn’t an act of courage. Instead of trying to obfuscate or find a legal way out or to delay a verdict, I do think part of that was self-protection to avoid a mob hit.”
In fact, during unearthed video depositions, Madoff — who was rumored for years to have ties with Russian crime syndicates and who famously befriended Colombo family boss Carmine John Persico Jr. while in prison — states that there were potential deals from the federal government on the table at the time of his trial, the Post reported.
“The prosecutor wanted me to plea-bargain with them to make some sort of a deal by providing information as to who else was involved with this fraud,” Madoff said during one deposition, according to the Post report. “The belief was that I couldn’t be doing this all by myself, that there had to be other people involved.”
Berlinger’s docuseries for Netflix also focuses on Madoff’s close associate, Frank DiPascali. The fellow New Yorker was a “trusted lieutenant for all his evil misdeeds,” Berlinger said, as was reported by the Post.
It was reported that DiPascali who died in 2015 while awaiting sentencing on multiple financial felonies had worked in conjunction with Madoff in terms of concocting fraudulent returns on investments that appeared unthinkable to most traders and investors, as was indicated in the Post story,
The Post reported that during a deposition, DiPascali admits, “There was one simple fact that Bernie Madoff knew, that I knew, and that other people knew, but we never told the clients nor did we tell the regulators like the SEC. No purchases or sales of securities were actually taking place in their accounts. It was all fake, it was all fictitious.”
