Bernie Madoff’s ex-secretary and four other former trusted staffers got filthy rich helping the Ponzi monster orchestrate “elaborate fiction” spanning decades prosecutors said Wednesday.
It included generating millions of pages of fake documents to dupe thousands of federal regulators, financial institutions and investors, they said.
“For over 30 years, Bernie Madoff ran a multibillion-dollar fraud that became the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, and these are the five people who helped him do it,” said Assistant US Attorney Matthew Schwartz while opening the government’s case before jurors in Manhattan federal court.
He pointed to the defendants: longtime secretary Annette Bongiorno, director of operations Daniel Bonventre, account manager JoAnn Crupi, and computer programmers Jerome O’Hara and George Perez.
Regarding Bongiorno and Crupi, Schwartz said, “These were the people in charge of people’s money and what lies to tell investors”
Schwartz said in the final days before Madoff’s company collapsed, insiders scored big paydays, with Bongiorno getting $58 million and Crupi nearly $5 million.