If only vanity was his biggest crime.
Ponzi king Bernie Madoff was such a narcissist that when the Wall Street Journal published a story in 1992 about an SEC investigation into two Florida accountants who funneled him money, the fraudster’s biggest concern was how the illustration made his face look, the scammer’s former right-hand man testified in Manhattan federal court Wednesday.
“He was concerned the caricature didn’t look like him — he said his cheeks looked too big,” said former Madoff CFO Frank DiPascali, an admitted fraudster turned star government witness.
The egocentric crook was, however, happy with the glowing treatment he received in the article.
“He was ticked off [the article] actually happened, but not upset where the verbiage took the reader,” testified DiPascali, 57, referring to how the article praised Madoff’s high returns and said he had “the Midas touch.”
DiPascali told jurors Madoff was nervous when the SEC probed two Florida accountants who funneled him over $400 million, but relieved when the agency failed to move on to investigate Madoff.
We felt like we had “dodged a bullet,” said DiPascali, who was testifying against five of his former co-workers, the first to stand trial over the epic $65 billion fraud to which Madoff pleaded guilty.
DiPascali also revealed how Madoff scrambled to avoid paying out too much cash to the estate of a client who kicked the bucket.
“When a guy dies, that’s a problem,” DiPascali said, using the death of French investor Jacques Amsellem as an example.
“It’s like a game of musical chairs. When the music stopped, the guy died with too much money in his account,” DiPascali said.
But when Amsellem’s estate requested documents showing how much the dead man had coming to him, Madoff created a fake account that showed a negative balance of $1,722,000 – so the total amount paid to Amsellem’s estate was exactly what the crooked Madoff wanted, DiPascali said.
DiPascali also testified about how favored Madoff client Stanley Chais, the Beverly Hills money manager who fed his clients’ cash to Madoff, got such favored treatment that his accounts were never allowed to take a loss.
Longtime Madoff secretary Annette Bongiorno, office staffer Joann Crupi, operations manager Daniel Bonventre, and computer programmers George Perez and Jerome O’Hara are on trial for allegedly aiding Madoff to pull off the decades-long scam.