This judge isn’t screwing around.
Manhattan federal Judge Laura Taylor Swain on Wednesday sided with a lawyer for Daniel Bonventre, one of Bernie Madoff’s top officers, who had asked that she bar prosecutors at his fraud trial from showing photographs to jurors of a 4-foot sculpture of a screw that the Ponzi king had proudly displayed on his desk.
It was called “The Soft Screw” and Madoff was known to personally dust it.
After prosecutors complained that many of their photos of Madoff’s office had the sculpture in it, Swain suggested they “Photoshop it out.”
“Get that screw out of the pictures,” Swain ordered.
Her ruling was the latest in a series of off-the-wall request by the five Madoff ex-staffers who are co-defendants in the massive fraud case. In 2009, Madoff was sentenced to 150 years behind bars after pleading guilty to the $65 billion Ponzi scheme that spanned decades.
Former Madoff secretary Annette Bongiorno on Tuesday got Swain’s blessing to bring a special chair into court. The short, portly 65-year-old in legal filings had claimed she’s so “diminutive in stature” that the chairs provided at Manhattan federal court would be too “uncomfortable” for her butt over extended periods when the trial begins Oct 7.
Bongiorno on Wednesday sat in a standard courtroom chair, her short legs dangling above the floor.
Prior to the hearing, Bonventre’s attorney Andrew Frisch waxed poetic about the infamous screw statue in a letter to Swain.
“Even if observers of the screw could have interpreted it as bespeaking Mr. Madoff’s resolve to impale rather than fasten, the link between any such resolve of the specific allegations of criminal fraud in this case is too fanciful and attenuated to justify its admission,” he wrote.
Lawyers for the other co-defendants also said they didn’t want the statue to come back to screw their clients during the trial.
Frisch also asked Swain to prohibit at trial evidence of the 2010 suicide by Madoff’s oldest son, Mark, on the second anniversary of his father’s arrest. She agreed after the government didn’t challenge.
Also heading to trial are former office worker Joann Crupi and computer programmers George Perez and Jerome O’Hara.
The feds have also made their own head-scratching requests to judge.
Swain denied a motion that jurors be barred from hearing the dirty details of Madoff’s sex-crazed office antics — including a bizarre “love triangle” he was enmeshed in with one of the defendants.