Madoff: Banks, funds 'complicit' in his scheme

NEW YORK (AP) — Disgraced Wall Street financier Bernard Madoff said in an interview published online Tuesday that banks and hedge funds were “complicit” in his scheme to fleece victims out of billions of dollars.

Madoff did not name any institutions in his series of interviews with The New York Times but said banks and hedge funds “were complicit in one form or another.” He said they failed to scrutinize the discrepancies between his regulatory filings and other information.

“They had to know,” he said in his first interviews for publication since his 2008 arrest. “But the attitude was sort of, ’If you’re doing something wrong, we don’t want to know.’”

Madoff spoke to the newspaper via e-mail and during a private two-hour interview at Butner Federal Correctional Complex in Butner, N.C., where he’s serving a 150-year sentence. The reporter who conducted the interviews, Diana B. Henriques, is writing a book about the Madoff scandal.

Madoff, who’s 72, touched on subjects including the effect of his crimes on his family, his son Mark Madoff’s suicide on Dec. 11 and the effort to recover money for his victims.

A court-appointed trustee seeking to recover money on behalf of Madoff’s victims filed a lawsuit this month against his primary banker, JPMorgan Chase, alleging the bank had suspected something wrong in his operation for years. The bank has denied any wrongdoing.

Madoff also said he had given the legal team of court-appointed trustee Irving Picard “information I knew would be instrumental in recovering assets from those people complicit in the mess I put myself into.”

David J. Sheehan, chief counsel for Picard, said in a statement Wednesday that Picard never met with Madoff. Sheehan says “there has been no direct communication between them.”