1 Boring Old Man

• Watch this ABC 20/20 program. About 3+ minutes in, there’s a very telling segment interviewing a former employee named Nadir Ibrahim. Bernie wasn’t around much any more it seems – in the "semi-retirement mode."
• Then there’s this interview on Fox News, again with Nadir Ibrahim.
• Who is Frank DiPascali? Frank DiPascali Jr. was Madoff’s Chief Financial Officer.

Bonjour, Bongiorno: Other Names Emerging in Madoff Case
WSJ Blogs
By Ashby Jones
03/09/09

Ever since December, we’ve been waiting for other shoes to drop in the Bernie Madoff fraud case. Now, the wait may be coming to an end.

News has broken that a longtime aide to Madoff, Annette Bongiorno, instructed two assistants to generate trading tickets, now believed to be bogus, for Madoff’s investing clients, according to information the assistants gave the government in the investigation. Click here for the story, from the WSJ’s Amir Efrati.

The assistants, Semone Anderson and Winnie Jackson, told prosecutors that Bongiorno, a four-decade veteran of the Madoff firm, would ask them to research daily share prices for blue-chip stocks from the previous month or several months. Using the data of past share prices, Bongiorno would then instruct the assistants to generate “tickets” showing purported trades, which resulted in gains that were in line with Madoff’s steady annual returns, this person said.

Bongiorno wasn’t reached for comment. Such fact-gathering doesn’t mean that prosecutors will determine there was any criminal liability…

Prosecutors also have begun interviewing employees from a group that was separate from Ms. Bongiorno and oversaw accounts for many of Madoff’s institutional accounts. That group was headed by Frank DiPascali Jr., 52, who hasn’t yet been asked to speak with prosecutors, according to a person familiar with the matter. DiPascali’s lawyer declined to comment on his client’s behalf.

Madoff’s ‘Street-Smart’ Aide DiPascali Was Investors’ Go-To Guy
Bloomberg
January 15, 2009
By David Voreacos, David Glovin and Patricia Hurtado

Frank DiPascali Jr. joined Bernard Madoff’s firm a year after graduating from a Catholic high school in Queens, New York. Over a 33-year career, he rose through the ranks, eventually calling himself chief financial officer. For investors like Tim Murray of Minnesota, DiPascali was a “street-smart New Yorker” who fielded calls about the millions of dollars he entrusted to the firm.

“To a Madoff customer with a discretionary account, he is the guy,” said Murray, 57, a real-estate developer. “There is nobody else.”

Now, U.S. prosecutors and regulators are probing whether DiPascali, 52, played a role in an alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme that led to Madoff’s arrest on Dec. 11, people familiar with the matter said… Madoff often told investors that options trading was a key to his success. DiPascali, who is not charged, became director of options in 1986 at the firm and CFO in 1996, according to a resume he prepared in 2002.

“Mr. DiPascali is a blue-collar guy, not a Wall Street master of the universe,” said his attorney Marc Mukasey, a former federal prosecutor now at Bracewell & Giuliani LLP in New York. “He is devastated by the losses to investors.” DiPascali, who grew up in the middle-class enclave of Howard Beach in Queens, now lives in suburban Bridgewater, New Jersey. He and his wife have raised four children. They live in a five-bedroom, five-bathroom house with a pool and cabana on seven wooded acres. They have two black Mercedes vehicles and a 61-foot boat built by Viking Yacht Co…