'All Just One Big Lie'
Bernard Madoff was a Wall Street whiz with a golden reputation. Investors, including Jewish charities, entrusted him with billions. It's gone.
(By Binyamin Appelbaum, David S. Hilzenrath and Amit R. Paley, The Washington Post)
紐約時報
On Wall Street, his name is legendary. With money he had made as a lifeguard on the beaches of Long Island, he built a trading powerhouse that had prospered for more than four decades. At age 70, he had become an influential spokesman for the traders who are the hidden gears of the marketplace.
But on Dec. 12, this consummate trader, Bernard L. Madoff, was arrested at his Manhattan home by federal agents who accused him of running a multibillion-dollar fraud scheme — perhaps the largest in Wall Street’s history.
The single count of securities fraud carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a maximum fine of $5 million.
Regulators have not yet verified the scale of the fraud. But the criminal complaint filed against Mr. Madoff on Thursday in federal court in Manhattan reports that he estimated the losses at $50 billion.
According to the most recent federal filings, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities operated more than two dozen funds overseeing $17 billion.
These funds have been widely marketed to wealthy investors, hedge funds and other institutional customers for more than a decade, although an S.E.C. filing in the case said the firm reported having 11 to 23 clients at the beginning of 2008.
The Madoff funds attracted investors with the promise of high returns and low fees. One of Mr. Madoff’s more prominent funds, the Fairfield Sentry fund, reported having $7.3 billion in assets in October 2008 and claimed to have paid more than 11 percent interest each year through its 15-year track record.
Founded in 1960, by the early 1980s, his firm was one of the largest independent trading operations in the securities industry. The company had around $300 million in assets in 2000 at the height of the Internet bubble and ranked among the top trading and securities firms in the nation.
Mr. Madoff ran the business with several family members, including his brother Peter, his nephew Charles, his niece Shana and his sons Mark and Andrew.
在馬多夫假投資真詐財案件中，損失最大的可能是Fairfield Sentry和Kingate兩檔避險基金，估計損失逾100億美元。紐約和佛羅里達兩地的散戶投資人也被詐騙數十億美元。
熟悉內情人士指出，本案最大輸家可能是投資人諾爾（Walter Noel）的Fairfield Greenwich集團，旗下Fairfield Sentry公司有73億美元交給馬多夫投資。另一家Kingate Management公司旗下的Kingate Global Fund，也託付馬多夫28億美元。
對今年虧損可能創紀錄的避險基金來說，馬多夫案可說是雪上加霜。根據摩根士丹利公司的報告，避險基金今年6月管理的資產為1.9兆，但預計明年1月1日以前將縮水至1.1兆美元。
另一大客戶費克斯資產管理公司（Fix Asset Management）在馬多夫公司的帳戶內至少有4億美元。創辦人之子約翰．費克斯說：「我們非常震驚，因為過去幾個月我們要求贖回都能順利拿到錢。我們對這整件事感到十分訝異。」
把錢交給馬多夫的散戶也不少。許多人和他有私交，但對他的投資策略一無所悉。馬多夫穿梭於紐約市和佛羅里達州，兩地俱樂部會員可能損失慘重，包括紐約長島 的Fresh Meadows鄉村俱樂部和Glen Oaks俱樂部，佛羅里達的Boca Rio高球俱樂部及棕櫚灘俱樂部。馬多夫是Fresh Meadow的會員，在棕櫚灘俱樂部則有經紀人，另有至少一名主力投資人幫忙介紹客源。
紐約一名68歲散戶投資人說，她和73歲的先生交給馬多夫1,200萬美元投資。每月逾六頁的交易紀錄顯示，馬多夫買賣頻繁。現在夫妻倆的積蓄可能化為烏 有，只剩6萬美元的銀行存款。住在休士頓的退休理財顧問葛琳伯格說，她已故的先生自1987年起在馬多夫公司投資，21年間財富增加十倍，從來沒有虧損紀 錄。她說，簡直不敢相信馬多夫會詐財。
The zoning lawyer in Miami trusted him because his father had dealt profitably with him for decades. The officers of a little charity in Massachusetts respected him and relied on his advice.
Wealthy men like J. Ezra Merkin, the chairman of GMAC; Fred Wilpon, the principal owner of the New York Mets; and Norman Braman, who owned the Philadelphia Eagles, simply appreciated the steady returns he produced, regardless of market conditions.
But these clients of Bernard L. Madoff had this in common: They chose him to oversee much of their personal wealth.
And now, they fear, they have lost it.
While Mr. Madoff is facing federal criminal charges, accused by federal prosecutors of operating a vast $50 billion Ponzi scheme, many of his clients are facing an abrupt reversal of fortune that is the stuff of nightmares.
“There are people who were very, very well off a few days ago who are now virtually destitute,” said Brad Friedman, a lawyer with the Milberg firm in Manhattan. “They have nothing left but their apartments or homes — which they are going to have to sell to get money to live on.”
From New York to Palm Beach, business associates of Mr. Madoff spent Friday assessing the damage, the extent of which will not be known for some time. Many invested with Mr. Madoff through other funds and may not know that their money is at risk.
Emergency meetings were being held at country clubs, schools and charities to assess the potential losses on their investments and to look for options.
There is not much guidance available yet from regulators. On Friday, a federal judge appointed a receiver to oversee the Madoff firm’s assets and customer accounts. A Web site is being set up to keep customers informed, but no one is sure yet whether any sort of safety net will catch the most vulnerable investors.
For Stephen J. Helfman, a lawyer in Miami whose father had opened an account with Mr. Madoff more than 30 years ago, the news on Thursday came as a hammer blow.
“The name ‘Madoff’ has overnight gone from being revered to reviled in the Helfman family,” Mr. Helfman said on Friday. His grandmother, at 98, relied on her Madoff money to pay for round-the-clock care, he said, and his two children’s college funds were wiped out.
“Thirty-six years of loyalty, through two generations, and this is what we get,” he said.
The news was equally devastating for the Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation in Salem, Mass., which works to reverse the dilution of Jewish identity through intermarriage and assimilation by sending teenagers to Israel and supporting other Jewish education efforts.
The foundation was forced on Friday to dismiss its small staff and shut down its programs to cope with its losses in the Madoff funds, according to Deborah Coltin, its executive director.
“We’ve canceled everything as of today, everything,” she said tearfully.
Ms. Coltin said she did not know how the little foundation came to be so exposed to the Madoff firm. Its most recent tax filings show that it had $7 million at the end of 2006, with $143,344 in stocks and the rest in “government securities.”
It reported the sale that year of “Bernie Madoff” securities, but did not explain what those securities were.
Sam Englebardt, a media investor in Los Angeles, said several relatives had entrusted virtually all of their assets to Mr. Madoff — and he understood why.
“It seems like a huge over-allocation, I know,” Mr. Englebardt said. “But remember, they had started out small and invested over 5 years, 15 years, 30 years — and every year they got a great return, and they could always take money out without ever having a problem.”
As that track record lengthened, his relatives gradually entrusted more of their savings to Mr. Madoff, he said. “I suspect that is what has happened across the board,” he added. “People came to trust him so much that, eventually, they trusted him with everything.”
Such stories were repeated in e-mail messages and telephone calls throughout the day on Friday. A woman in Brooklyn whose father died just weeks ago found that his entire estate and a substantial portion of her stepmother’s money was invested with Mr. Madoff. A law school official in Massachusetts fears he has lost millions in the collapse of the Madoff operation.
Some wealthy victims, of course, can afford to seek redress on their own. But for them, litigation seems the only certainty.
Throughout the rumor-fueled hedge fund world on Friday, money managers were comparing notes and assessing losses. By all accounts, they run broad and deep — in the billions.
Mr. Merkin, a prominent philanthropist and the founder of several hedge funds, including one called Ascot Partners, jolted his clients on Thursday with a letter announcing that “substantially all” of that fund’s $1.8 billion in assets were invested with Mr. Madoff.
“As one of the largest investors in our fund, I have also suffered major losses from this catastrophe,” Mr. Merkin said in the letter. “We have retained counsel to determine what our next steps should be.”
Some of Mr. Merkin’s investors have also “retained counsel.” Harry Susman, a lawyer in the Houston office of Susman Godfrey, said he was talking with several clients about legal options.
“These investors were never aware that all of their money was invested with Madoff,” Mr. Susman said. “They are obviously shocked.”
Sterling Equities and the Wilpon family acknowledged on Friday that they had money at risk in the Madoff scandal.
“We are shocked by recent events and, like all investors, will continue to monitor the situation,” said Richard C. Auletta, a spokesman for Sterling and the Wilpons.
The Mets organization issued a statement saying that the scandal would not derail its new Citi Field stadium project in Queens or “affect the day-to-day operations and long-term plans of the Mets organization.”
A lawyer for Norman Braman of Miami, a wealthy retired retailer and the former owner of the Philadelphia Eagles football team, confirmed that Mr. Braman, too, had money locked up and perhaps lost in the Madoff mess.
And Bramdean Alternatives, a London asset manager run by Nicola Horlick, saw its share price plummet nearly 36 percent on Friday after it announced that nearly 10 percent of its holdings were caught in the Madoff scandal.
Mr. Madoff has resigned from his positions at Yeshiva University, where he was treasurer for the university’s board and deeply involved in the business school.
“Our lawyers and accountants are investigating all aspects of his relationship to Yeshiva University,” said Hedy Shulman, a spokeswoman for the university.
The most recent tax filings for the university show that its endowment fund, a separate charity, was heavily invested in hedge funds and other nontraditional alternatives at the end of its fiscal year in 2006.
The school paper, the Yeshiva Commentator, recently reported that its endowment’s value had dropped to $1.4 billion from $1.8 billion — before the scandal broke.
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