Bernie Madoff could soon be seeing some old pals behind bars.
Five loyal ex-staffers of the Ponzi monster’s investment firm were convicted Monday by a Manhattan federal jury of helping Madoff pull off his epic $17 billion fraud — and profiting handsomely from it.
“Everybody [on the jury] was on board. The facts spoke for themselves,” one of the jurors, Sheila Amatl of Rockland, said afterwards.
Madoff’s former operations chief Daniel Bonventre, secretary Annette Bongiorno and account manager Joann Crupi were each convicted on securities fraud and tax-evasion charges while computer programmers Jerome O’Hara and George Perez were convicted on the fraud charges, ending a five-month, white-collar trial that was one of the longest in New York’s history.
The defendants– who are expected to appeal — each face a maximum of 78 to 220 years behind bars. They were all released on bail and scheduled to be are sentenced separately July 28 to July 30.
“The name Madoff was a tall mountain to climb,” said Crupi’s lawyer Eric Breslin.
Amatl said Bonventre and Bongiorno didn’t do themselves any favors by testifying on the witness stand, adding their remarks seemed “very scripted’ and “made me feel that they were guilty.”
She and other jurors polled also said they didn’t buy the defendants claims that they were duped by Madoff – just as thousands of his investors also were for decades. And other jurors said they hoped the guilty verdict would provide some closure to victims of Madoff and his minions.
“I’m Jewish, and I know a lot of the victims were Jewish, so I feel good about that,” said juror Nancy Goldberg of Yorktown Heights.
“I feel that I’ve helped. There were a lot of good, trusting people who were suddenly bamboozled and taken advantage of. It was the right decision.”
Prosecutors said Bonventre “cooked the books” to fool auditors and government regulators and oversaw an account that was “at the heart of the fraud” for decades. Crupi and Bongiorno, they said, backdated phony trades, deceived auditors and federal regulators and committed other crimes. Perez and O’Hara are alleged to have developed computer programs to help Madoff manufacture false books and other records.
The 11-person jury, which spent four days deliberating during which a 12th juror was excused for illness, unanimously voted “guilty” on each of the 31 separate charges, some of which only applied to certain defendants. During the trial, they heard testimony from more than 40 witnesses and reviewed roughly 1,600 government exhibits.
Madoff is serving a 150-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to the scheme in 2009 and has claimed he acted alone.
Eight of his ex-staffers have also pleaded guilty to assisting their crooked ex-boss, including former finance chief Frank DiPascali, who was the centerpiece of the prosecution’s case.
Former Madoff clients claim losing more than $17 billion through the Ponzi scheme. A court-appointed trustee has recovered much of the money by forcing those customers who received big payouts from Madoff to return the funds.
After the fraud was revealed in December 2008, Madoff admitted that the nearly $68 billion he claimed then existed in his company accounts was actually only a few hundred million dollars.