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When Bernie Madoff popped up in the news again last week, this time when it was alleged that his bankers at JP Morgan Chase saw red flags in his actions but failed to tell the authorities, I felt that familiar feeling again--nothing. Because I don't hate Bernie Madoff. Why should I? SNIP I shed no tears for Madoff, but nor do I clench a fist. Madoff didn't do anything to me. However, if I were forced to join an investment fund that I knew to be a Ponzi scheme and made to watch helplessly as my dollars were sucked out...

The overseer trying to recover funds for Bernie Madoff's victims slapped J.P. Morgan Chase with a $6.4 billion suit Thursday, claiming the bank turned a blind eye to the mega-fraudster's swindling. Trustee Irving Picard says officials at J.P. Morgan, Madoff's longtime banker, should have spotted red flags alerting them to the Ponzi scheme. "Just as in the children's fable, they knew the 'Emperor had no clothes,' but looked the other way, allowing the fraud to continue," Picard's lawyer, Deborah Renner, said Thursday. The bank "admitted in the months before Madoff's arrest that ... returns were too good - especially in...

Mets owners are in a much tighter squeeze than they are letting on. Sterling Equities, which is controlled by Wilpon and son, Jeff, is supposedly worth some $750M and $1B. The Wilpons want to replace roughly $750M,...their losses with convicted Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff.....and are now in settlement talks with the Madoff estate trustee, who claims they withdrew $48M more than they invested. They are opposing a move to unseal legal papers, saying the papers are attempted "character assassination"..... painting [Mets owners] as persons who should have known that Madoff did no trading".........

The court-appointed trustee recovering money for Bernard L. Madoff's victims is preparing a wave of new lawsuits seeking to wrest funds away from investors who also were duped by the Ponzi scheme. In an interview, Irving Picard said he could wind up suing about half the estimated 2,000 individual investors he has called "net winners" from their dealings with Mr. Madoff. Such investors withdrew more from Mr. Madoff's firm than the amount of principal they invested. "The people who made money, who got more, have made money at the expense of the people who didn't," said Mr. Picard, who has...

Bernard Madoff has mocked the investors he swindled out of $65bn (£45bn), reportedly saying that he "carried them" for 20 years and that he took money from "greedy" rich people who wanted more. The revelations come from an extended piece in New York Magazine, in which fellow inmates discussed Madoff's behaviour and actions during his time at New York's Metropolitan Correctional Centre (MCC) and the federal prison in Butner, North Carolina, where he is serving his sentence. During his time at the MCC, he reportedly told one fellow prisoner that the crime was not fully of his own making, and...

Cap-And-Trade: While senators froth over Goldman Sachs and derivatives, a climate trading scheme being run out of the Chicago Climate Exchange would make Bernie Madoff blush. Its trail leads to the White House. Lost in the recent headlines was Al Gore's appearance Monday in Denver at the annual meeting of the Council of Foundations, an association of the nation's philanthropic leaders. "Time's running out (on climate change)," Gore told them. "We have to get our act together. You have a unique role in getting our act together." Gore was right that foundations will play a key role in keeping the...

Bernard Madoff, who is serving a 150-year sentence in North Carolina for running a fraud scheme that cost investors billions of dollars, was physically assaulted by another inmate in December, according to three people familiar with the matter. After the attack, Mr. Madoff, who pleaded guilty a year ago and was sent to a federal prison in Butner, N.C., was moved on Dec. 18 to the prison's low-security medical center for treatment. At the time, the Bureau of Prisons said that rumors of an assault were false and that Mr. Madoff suffered from dizziness and hypertension. One of his lawyers,...

CONVICTED fraudster Bernie Madoff, who is currently serving a 150-year sentence in a US jail, was bashed by a fellow inmate in December, a report says. A former inmate told The Wall Street Journal said the fight was centered on money the attacker thought he was owed by Madoff. He said a prison officer found Madoff lying wounded on a floor. Madoff was treated for a broken nose, fractured ribs and cuts to his head and face, according to another prisoner currently serving time on drug charges. Madoff pleaded guilty last year to tricking thousands of people out of billions...

Fort Lauderdale, Florida (CNN) -- The photographs on the walls of Scott Rothstein's office at his law firm in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, were a who's who of Washington. There were photos of Rothstein shaking hands with former President George W. Bush and Rothstein with Bush's brother, Jeb, who is Florida's former governor. More photos showed Rothstein glad-handing Sarah Palin, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bill Richardson. And then there were the senators: Joe Lieberman, Mel Martinez, Arlen Specter and John McCain. All appeared happy to be in the company of a man who by some estimates contributed at least $1.9 million to...

None of them has been prosecuted yet in connection with Madoff’s massive swindle: brother Peter was chief compliance officer; Peter's daughter, Shana Madoff Swanson, was compliance officer; sons Andrew and Mark were co-directors of trading. Last month, a lawyer for Peter Madoff disclosed in a NJ civil suit that he was under federal criminal investigation. All have agreed to a court-ordered freeze on assets......the latest effort to squeeze Madoff family holdings, which once included three yachts, posh penthouses, summer mansions, artworks -- from Madoff's $65B Ponzi scheme. They “will incur no debt, obligation, or other liability, directly or indirectly, beneficially...

Entitlements: While a massive health care entitlement is fashioned in secret, another one, Social Security, is running deficits decades earlier than expected. We've been kicking the can down the road. We're out of road. As Bernie Madoff found out, any Ponzi scheme depends on a continuous inflow of new cash and new customers or the ever-expanding pyramid will totter and collapse. Social Security, dependent as it was on new workers paying the expanding benefits of retirees, is about to, much sooner than expected. As Ed Morrissey over at HotAir.com reminds us, Peter Orszag, now director of the Office of Management...

Here is a video report saying disgraced financier Bernie Madoff is being treated for serious "facial injuries," broken ribs and a collapsed lung after he supposedly "fell out of bed" in a North Carolina Federal Prison. Other reports had said Madoff had injuries "consistent with an assault." But officials now are saying the injuries are the result of him falling out of bed. . . . (VIDEO)

Reform: Only a Bernie Madoff could believe the Senate's health care bill will extend coverage to 31 million Americans while cutting deficits by $127 billion over 10 years. It would be the first profitable entitlement. But that's what Majority Leader Harry Reid, citing Congressional Budget Office estimates, tells us the 2,074-page bill — said to cost only $849 billion over a decade — would do. Like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, he seems to be following Vice President Joe Biden's admonition at an AARP town hall meeting that "we've got to spend money to keep from going bankrupt." We suspect Reid's...

Junk Science: The oracle of climate disaster has a new book out on global warming that should be on the fiction list. He asks us to commit economic suicide while he rakes in millions from his green investments. 'Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis," Al Gore's sequel to his 2006 tome "An Inconvenient Truth," came out Tuesday. Printed on recycled paper using low-VOC (volatile organic compound) ink, it will undoubtedly be a best-seller and on the desk of every attendee at next month's climate change conference in Copenhagen. In a press release announcing the book, the Oscar-...

PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) - Jeffry Picower, a Florida philanthropist alleged to have extracted billions from Bernard Madoff's investment scheme, drowned in his pool Sunday, police said. He was 67. The former New York lawyer and accountant had been a friend of Madoff for decades. A statement from Palm Beach police said Picower's wife and a maid found the body at the bottom of the pool Sunday afternoon and rescue workers could not revive him. Picower was transported to Good Samaritan Medical Center where he was pronounced dead at about 1:30 p.m.

Former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission chairmen and directors were generally unaware that staff were probing Bernard Madoff until the former financier was arrested in December 2008 for running a $65 billion Ponzi scheme, a federal watchdog said in a report released on Friday. The report underscores the disconnection between senior officials and their employees, who often lacked the experience necessary to follow up on leads and understand the magnitude of their investigation. Former Chairmen Christopher Cox, William Donaldson and Arthur Levitt, former director of enforcement Linda Thomsen and former director of examinations and compliance, Lori Richards, did not play...

Excerpted with permission of publisher John Wiley & Sons Inc "Madoff with the Money," by JERRY OPPENHEIMER. Long before Madoff became Ponzi king, he was scamming his way through Queens and LI, tricking suburban moms into buying overpriced sprinkler systems, inflating his golf score and taking the easy way out at school. HIS PARENTS Bernie Madoff was a born operator who always seemed to know his way around the system, even when he was a young punk growing up in Laurelton, Queens. Schoolboy Bernie was too busy thinking of ways to make money -- an endeavor impressed upon him at...

What's really behind the push in the healthcare bill to limit, by government decree, healthcare options? It's because of the government's medicare Ponzi scheme that makes Bernie Madoff look like just a simple short-game grifter. As Gary North points out, Medicare's hospital fund is already bankrupt: This is taken from a March 25, 2008 press release from the U.S. government's Department of Health and Human Services. This year the HI Trust Fund will spend more than its income, and from 2009 through 2017, about $342 billion will need to be transferred from the Federal treasury to cover beneficiaries' hospital insurance...

Bernard Madoff hires help to survive hard time (Bob Daemmrich/Polaris/eyevine) The 'Supermax' jail in Colorado where Madoff could find himself James Bone in New York Bernard Madoff has hired a veteran prison consultant to help him to find the best possible jail in which to serve his 150-year sentence for Wall Street’s biggest fraud. After his sentencing this week Madoff, now Prisoner No 1727-054, met Herb Hoelter, of the National Centre for Institutions and Alternatives, whose previous clients include the jailed Sotheby’s chairman Alfred Taubman and the financiers Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky. The draconian maximum sentence imposed by the...

*** Madoff's victims know their tormentor will never be released from prison. Judge Denny Chin's sentence was appropriate.....Madoff was one of the most vile and disgusting individuals to ever enter the criminal-justice system. NAMES REDACTED Upper Saint Clair, Pa. *** Now we can go after even bigger thieves, like Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and all the other social Democrats. Pine Bush *** The possibility of his wife and sons being convicted would be icing on the cake. Manhattan *** The very wealthy who lost money were victims only to our culture's most unattractive traits: greed and snobbery. You can't...