Madoff Trustee Goes After the Goods

Irving Picard, the hard working court-appointed trustee tasked with recovering assets for Bernie Madoff's victims, said in an interview that he might sue around half the estimated 2,000 individual investors who unwittingly made money investing in the ponzi scheme. Although Mr. Picard sent hundreds of letters last year to investors who withdrew money from their Madoff accounts before the fraud was exposed asking them to settle the matter amicably, few of them have chosen to do so. Now it's time to pay the piper. While it seems entirely reasonable (not to mention lawful) for Mr. Picard to go after those who accidentally profited from the scheme, it's not as easy to stomach when you are, say, an 87 year-old retiree who plowed all of her life savings, including the life insurance proceeds from her husband's passing, into what she thought was a safe investment.

Meanwhile, Mr. Picard accused one of the largest feeder funds, Fairfield Greenwich Group, of having "actual and constructive knowledge" of the ponzi scheme. Not sure why this took two years to figure out. When you get paid hundreds of millions in fees to perform due diligence for investors, and yet you are incapable of making a phone call to a single counterparty to make sure the firm is actually trading with somebody else. Or perhaps confirming that the auditing firm has the 20 partners it claims to have and isn't just one dude in an office in Florida. Or actually doing something, anything other than counting and spending all those fat fees on houses and cars and boats and PR agents to brag about all your houses and cars and boats in Vanity Fair, then you probably are more than just a lousy money manager. You are probably complicit in the scheme. But in either case, you need to give the money back so that those 87 year-old retirees can have something to split between them.