Madoff's helpers

Louis Ruckeyser and his Wall Street Week were regular Friday viewing for years.  He had a small segment during his intro where he turned to the Wall Street Elfs to see what their sentiment was.  These elfs were the technical folks who were the proverbial "I know where the silver is buried" types.  Every office has one - the person who can find anything, knows all the numbers, has a memory like a stone tablet and seems to have been put on earth to keep the boss from going to jail or being lynched.

Double sets of books aren't a new trick.  Our own NY MTA kept them for years. One set went to the regulators when it was fare increase time and the other was real.  They were pretty easy to spot as one was in red ink the other in black......I digress.  Most of the time the difference between reality and what is written down are minor things.  Obviously the more complicated the business the more time and effort must be expended to write the fictional accounts.  As anyone will attest, telling even a little white lie requires a memory and telling a series of them, each ever more complicated, usually is a recipe for disaster.

This is Annette. She and her co-worker Joanne got pinched by the Feds for keeping those infamous second set of books - the ones that were trotted out to show the regulators. Obviously given a thankless task at what would be considered a modest salary for the importance of their work in the Madoff scheme, they must have had other perks than salary.

This brings me to the point - and yes I have one - at what time in the course of their work did they wake up in the morning and go "oh oh...I could get in real trouble for this"?  When did it dawn on them that saying "no" wasn't an option and they were in for a dime in for a dollar?

Twenty or so years ago I got suckered in by a lawyer in a company takeover deal. I bought the pig in the poke mainly because I asked to meet with the CPAs and have them show me the books. I remember Morgenstern, the one CPA, shaky hands, sweat, breaking voice showing me the ledgers, the bank statements, etc. and his glistening letter of status.  It was all good. Not great but all good. A few months after the purchase I found out that my majority ownership was just diluted by the sudden appearance of another block of shares greater than mine owned by a lot of people who didn't exist in reality and that the half million or so in the bank accounts were accessed by a the seller during the quiet period and false bank statements sent by Mr. Morgenstern to me.   In short, there had to a moment for Morgenstern when he woke up and knew what he was doing was a bad thing yet he did it and kept doing it.

I just wonder about people some days.