The five ex-staffers of Bernie Madoff found guilty of helping the Ponzi monster pull off his epic $17 billion fraud are demanding an acquittal or new trial, claiming they were railroaded by flawed jury deliberations and false testimony from government witnesses.
Former Madoff operations chief Daniel Bonventre, secretary Annette Bongiorno, account manager Joann Crupi, and computer programmers Jerome O’Hara and George Perez filed legal papers Tuesday asking Manhattan federal Judge Laura Taylor Swain to toss the jury’s March guilty verdict.
“It is difficult to imagine how, in no more than three full days’ time, the jurors could have been able to thoroughly review and carefully consider the specific exhibits and transcripts they requested — let alone all the evidence in this case presented over five months — as to each defendant on each” of the 31 counts, O’Hara’s lawyer, Gordon Mehler, told the judge.
He also said some of the jurors’ comments to reporters afterward suggested they rushed to a decision or were wrongly influenced by ethnicity.
He cited how juror Nancy Goldberg of Yorktown Heights told The Post after the trial that she felt “good” about the verdict because she’s Jewish and “a lot of the victims were Jewish.”
Mehler also said Goldberg telling the Wall Street Journal that the defendants “deserved to be punished” suggested that she didn’t take seriously into account the evidence — or lack of it.
Crupi’s lawyer, Eric Breslin, said his client deserves a new trial because the earlier one was filled with flawed testimony by former Madoff lieutenant Frank DiPascali and other government witnesses, along with “absurd” and “ridiculous” false remarks about the defendants by prosecutors.
“By the end of the government’s rebuttal, two things became apparent: the government had set out to win this case at any cost, and the defendants had been stripped of their right to a fair and just trial,” Breslin wrote.
The defendants each face a maximum of 78 to 220 years behind bars. They were all released on bail and are scheduled to be sentenced separately from July 28 to July 30.
Bonventre, Bongiorno and Crupi were each convicted on securities fraud and tax-evasion charges while O’Hara and Perez were convicted on the fraud charges. The five-month, white-collar trial was one of the longest in New York’s history.