Sunday, December 21, 2008

Madoff's List

From Alexander Cockburn at Counterpunch:
Among those apparently taking serious and even financially fatal hits [from Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme]: Yeshiva University in New York, Senator Frank Lautenberg, New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon, real estate and media mogul Mortimer Zuckerman (“significantly hurt”), GMAC Financial Services chairman J. Ezra Merkin (who ran a hedge fund, Ascot Partners, which reinvested many charities’ funds with Madoff), the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, Steven Spielberg’s Wunderkinder Foundation, Jeff Katzenberg, the Boston-based Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation (which has closed its doors), Eliot Spitzer’s family, the Chais Family Foundation, the Carl and Ruth Shapiro Foundation, Hadassah (the Women’s Zionist Organization of America), the United Jewish Endowment Fund of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington , the Los Angeles’ Jewish Community Foundation’s $238 million Common Investment Pool, the American Jewish Congress, the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology...

In less polite society it might be called "street tax"[1]:
....Madoff poured money into the Democratic Senatorial Campaign war chest ($100,000 between 2005 and 2008)and made large contributions to important Democrats on the Finance Committees, like Rep Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) . Waxman and Schumer have hastily announced they’re donating Madoff's money to charity.

[1]Harry Markopolos, who worked for a rival firm, researched Madoff's stock-options strategy and was convinced the outsized results were literally unreal. "Madoff Securities is the world's largest Ponzi Scheme," Mr. Markopolos wrote in a letter to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 2000. Mr. Markopolos pursued his accusations over the years, dealing with both the New York and Boston bureaus of the SEC, according to documents he sent to the SEC reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. In a statement late Friday, the SEC said, "staff from the Division of Enforcement in New York completed an investigation in 2007, and did not refer the matter to the Commission for enforcement action." Madoff's niece is also married to a former high level SEC enforcement official. The niece worked as a compliance attorney at Madoff's firm. The official was a member of the exam team that audited Madoff's firm in 1999 and 2004. Madoff Investment Secuirties spent $400,000 lobbying Washington over ten years. $39,000 went directly to Senator Schumer, but Madoff also gave to Rep. Vito Fossella (R-NY). http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1208/16608.html