Madoff’s early investors get help from an unlikely source: Madoff
New York — Dozens of Bernard Madoff’s early investors are getting help from an unlikely source in a fight to keep their profits: the con man himself. From his federal lock-up in Butner, North Carolina, Madoff said at a recent deposition he was a legitimate securities broker for decades, until 1992. Before that, he said, he was mostly clean as a whistle. Madoff made a similar claim in his guilty plea eight years ago, but the issue hasn’t really mattered until now. It’s become crucial to resolving some 80 lawsuits in which Irving Picard, the trustee appointed to handle the firm’s dissolution, is seeking about $100m in profits from a group of customers who invested before 1992. The central issue is when the fraud started. If it began after 1992, those customers may get to keep their profit; if it started before, they lose out. The cases pit the word of Wall Street’s most notorious liar against the claims of a trustee with mountains of evidence from a sweeping probe that found no eviden...
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