An excerpt from the article:
In his first interview for publication since his arrest in December 2008, Mr. Madoff — looking noticeably thinner and rumpled in khaki prison garb — maintained that family members knew nothing about his crimes.
But during a private two-hour interview in a visitor room here on Tuesday, and in earlier e-mail exchanges, he asserted that unidentified banks and hedge funds were somehow “complicit” in his elaborate fraud, an about-face from earlier claims that he was the only person involved.
And:
In many ways, however, Mr. Madoff seemed unchanged. He spoke with great intensity and fluency about his dealings with various banks and hedge funds, pointing to their “willful blindness” and their failure to examine discrepancies between his regulatory filings and other information available to them.
“They had to know,” Mr. Madoff said. “But the attitude was sort of, ‘If you’re doing something wrong, we don’t want to know.’"
The costs of Bernie Madoff go well beyond the tragic stories of his investors...it also includes the loss of faith in an industry that already struggles with policing fraud and dishonesty. It costs us all in regulatory oversight expenses, limitations on legitimate hedge funds and limited partnerships, and countless other ways we've yet to see. He's filth and I hope his son's death haunts him forever.
