A Manhattan federal jury on Monday got an up-close and personal look at just how good a liar Bernie Madoff really is.
Eric Breslin, a lawyer for Joann Crupi — one of five former Madoff employees on trial in the $16 billion investor swindle — played jurors clips from an Oct. 20, 2007, round-table discussion titled “The Future of the Stock Market” — in which the notorious Ponzi schemer, incredibly, talked about how firms can avoid being victims of fraud.
Crupi was Madoff’s accounts manager. She and four other ex-co-workers on trial for fraud, believe the video shows how lying was second nature for Madoff — adding to their defense that they were duped by their former boss just as thousands of investors were.
In the video made a little more than a year before his arrest, a jovial Madoff says “so-called Chinese walls” must be established at firms “to keep” them “from taking advantage” of the market based on their knowledge of what their clients are trading.
Madoff said it’s always best “to take the human being out of the equation” and let computers handle certain aspects of a trade, so the firm doesn’t feel influenced one way or the other, based on the amount of money to be made.
“Maybe one day we can get the computer to commit fraud, but we haven’t gotten there yet,” he joked.
Unlike two other co-defendants who opted to testify in their defense — former Madoff secretary Annette Bongiorno and former operations chief Daniel Bonventre — Crupi and computer programmers Jerome O’Hara and George Perez told Judge Laura Taylor Swain they would not be taking the witness stand.
Bongiorno finished up her fourth day of testimony, talking about how Madoff for many years provided her an additional perk of paying for her car service to and from work.
The perk was offered after she complained decades ago of fainting on the train one summer “from heat exhaustion” while heading into the Manhattan office.