Bernie Madoff’s Secretary Spills The Beans On The Ponzi Masters Scheme
”Some people were crying very hard…”
Vannity Fair has just blown the lid off the secrets of Bernie Madoffs ponzi operation!
Click here for the full story
Bernie Madoff was a sexist, egomaniacal, short-tempered control freak–yet everybody loved him.
After spending two months helping the F.B.I.
The article, entitled “Hello, Madoff!,” is accompanied by more than a dozen intimate photos of Madoff and his family from as far back as the 1970s.
Squillari recalls an unusually prescient conversation she had with Madoff years earlier, after a client’s secretary had been arrested for embezzlement.
The way Madoff handled stress was “by saying something nasty: You look terrible. You’re gaining weight. You’re stupid. I never took anything he said to me personally, because I knew it wasn’t about me, it was about him.”
Madoff’s behavior changed drastically in the weeks before his arrest.
Bernie was irresistible to women” and “had a roving eye.” Squillari once caught him perusing the escort ads in the back of a magazine, and he frequently visited massage parlors.
Madoff was flirtatious and had a habit of making sexually suggestive remarks: “‘Oh, you know you’re crazy about me,’ he would say to me. Sometimes when he came out of his bathroom, which was diagonal to my desk, he would still be zipping up his pants. If he saw me shaking my head disapprovingly, he would say, ‘Oh, you know it excites you.’ If a pretty young woman came in, he’d say, ‘Do you remember when you used to look like that?’ I’d tell him, ‘Knock it off, Bernie,’ and he’d go, ‘Ah, you still look good.’ Then he’d try to pat me on the ass.”
Ruth and Bernie Madoff on the yacht of real-estate tycoon Norman Levy, circa 2000.
Bernie’s wife, Ruth, “wanted to be perfect for him. She would never allow herself to gain weight or have a hair out of place, and she always kept an eagle eye on him, especially when he was around young, attractive women.” However, “if Bernie said something to Ruth that annoyed her, she’d say, ‘Go fuck yourself,’ or ‘I don’t give a shit.’ That’s the way they talked to each other.”
The staff on 17 “were mostly low-level, clerical women, many of them working mothers, who probably made no more than $40,000 a year. They were young and na�ve, with no background in finance, so they weren’t able to connect the dots.” Squillari was friendly with two of those women and says, “Whenever I went downstairs, they were always busy doing paperwork while [their boss] Annette [Bongiorno] watched them like a hawk. Once, I remember, Annette had the phones removed from her employees’ desks after she became concerned that they were making personal calls. She treated them like children.”
In the days after her husband’s arrest, Ruth Madoff called Squillari multiple times and encouraged the secretary to provide her with certain information without notifying the bankruptcy trustees, which Squillari said she couldn’t do.
Looking back on things, Squillari believes Madoff meticulously planned out the particulars of his arrest.
Vanity Fair’s June issue, which contains the full text of “Hello, Madoff,” is on newsstands in New York and Los Angeles today, and nationwide on May 12.
Mail this postRelated videos:
