Documents filed by defence lawyers estimate that Madoff and his wife, Ruth, have assets worth between $823m and $826m (£589m to £591m) including four homes, four boats, a share in a private jet and a Steinway piano. To maintain their properties, they are burning through cash at a rate of $346,757 a month.

In a filing to the US appeals court, Madoff’s lawyer, Ira Sorkin, says his client was fully co-operative with the terms of his release before judge Denny Chin jailed him on Thursday.

Sorkin says the judge’s description of Madoff as a “flight risk” is “clearly erroneous”, pointing out that he made no attempt at escaping during three months under house arrest even though he was “always cognisant of the fact that he would die in prison”.

Sorkin says Madoff and his wife have told the US government that they are “willing to relinquish many of their assets”.

Details of the couple’s wealth are unlikely to please Madoff’s victims. The financier has in effect been living off the proceeds of crime for nearly two decades, having admitted in court that he began operating his investment firm as a Ponzi scheme as far back as the early 1990s.

The couple’s flat on Manhattan’s upper east side is valued at $4m, while a house in the millionaires’ playground of the Hamptons is worth $1.58m. A Palm Beach getaway has a price tag of $2.46m and a property in the French resort of Antibes is pegged at $900,000. They keep a $7m yacht named Bull on a $1.5m boatslip near their house on the Côte d’Azur. Another boat, Sitting Bull, is worth $320,000 while a vessel in Florida described as a “Rybovich fishing boat” is valued at $2.2m.

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BOSTON - His repeated warnings that Wall Street money manager Bernard Madoff was running a giant Ponzi scheme have cast Harry Markopolos as an unheeded prophet.

But people who know or worked with Markopolos say it wasn’t prescience that helped him foresee the collapse of Madoff’s alleged $50 billion fraud. Instead, they say diligence and a strong moral sense drove his quixotic, nine-year quest to alert regulators about Madoff.

“He followed through on everything he ever did. He never let up,” said his mother, Georgia Markopolos, in an interview Thursday. “Some kids just let it go if it’s too hard, but he wouldn’t do that.”

“He feels very sorry for these people that got taken,” she added. “It wouldn’t have happened if they would have listened to him long ago.”

Markopolos waged a remarkable battle to uncover fraud at Madoff’s operation, sounding the alarm back in 1999 and continuing with his warnings all through this decade. The government never acted, Madoff continued his ways, and people lost billions.

Markopolos reached his conclusion with the help of mathematicians like Dan diBartolomeo, whose analysis of the Madoff’s methods in 1999 helped fuel Markopolos’ suspicions.

“People should have seen the writing on the wall,” diBartolomeo said.Read the full story here.

NEW YORK — The day after Bernard Madoff was placed behind bars, investigators returned Friday to the arduous task of piecing together one of the largest frauds in history — and trying to determine if anyone else was involved.

The FBI has declined to discuss the status of an investigation expected to drag on for months. But experts say it’s certain Madoff’s closest relatives and associates are high on the list of people authorities suspect may have known about a scheme that was making them hundreds of millions of dollars.

“I think it’s fair to say that his family is a subject of the investigation,” said George Jackson, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice in Chicago.

Madoff faces a maximum sentence of 150 years in prison after pleading guilty Thursday to 11 charges including fraud, perjury and money laundering, telling a judge he was “deeply sorry and ashamed.” The judge immediately jailed him — a decision his lawyers asked an appeals court to reverse on Friday.

Jackson predicted more indictments, potentially alleging a conspiracy by Madoff insiders. But he and others stressed the investigation still is in its early stages, and that Madoff’s guilty plea had no bearing on its course.

Any potential suspects “are not better or worse off than they were before the plea,” said Christopher Clark, another former federal prosecutor in Manhattan. “The investigation is going to keep going along at its own pace.”

Given the enormity of the paper trail, Clark predicted it would be six months to a year before more charges are brought. Those studying Madoff’s financial records have also said it is too early to know exactly where the money went over decades.

Court documents filed Friday show Madoff and his wife had a combined net worth of more than $823 million at the end of last year, including a $7 million yacht and four properties worth a total of $22 million. Last month, a court-appointed trustee overseeing the liquidation of Madoff’s firm reported that about $1 billion in assets had been recovered from the business.Read the rest of the story here.

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Now that he has pleaded guilty, Bernard Madoff’s story might be seen to have reached an end of sorts.

But so vast was the scale of his crime that the legacy of his extraordinary fraud will take years, if not decades to reveal itself.

First and foremost of course are the many livelihoods and life savings lost to Madoff’s fraudulent scheme.

But behind the personal fortunes that Madoff leaves in ruins, looms the crumbling wreckage of the US’s system of financial regulation.

Risk profiles

It’s not as if the regulators here were in such good shape anyway.

A banking industry on its knees, threatening to bring down the rest of the economy, has led many on Wall Street and in Washington to conclude that something is fundamentally wrong with the way the US polices its financial markets and the players in them.

Just this week no less than Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, and Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, have spoken of the need for the US, if not the world, to have a full rethink of how the financial industries are regulated.

The trouble is that financial regulation, by its nature, can be a pretty abstract business.

Getting to the bottom of how the US’s regulators failed will require some of the finest minds being applied to some horribly complex subjects, which, to the general public at least, may be a tad elusive.

Read the rest of the article here.

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While Madoff insists he acted alone, prosecutor Lev Dassin said he was investigating if others had joined in the crime.

Investigators are also continuing work to see how much of the stolen funds can be recovered.

Madoff has been remanded in jail ahead of his sentencing in June.

This has seen him swap his wife’s luxury Manhattan apartment for a small cell in New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Centre, just a few miles away.

No plea deal

“We are continuing to investigate the fraud and will bring additional charges against anyone, including Mr Madoff, as warranted,” said Mr Dassin.

He also rejected speculation that Madoff had agreed to plead guilty in exchange for leniency to help any others who may have been involved in the crime. “There is no agreement whatsoever,” he said.Read the rest of the story here.

“I realized that my arrest and this day would inevitably come,” Madoff said in a courtroom crammed with many of the investors he cheated out of billions of dollars.

The 70-year-old financier could get up to 150 years in prison at sentencing June 16 on 11 counts, including securities fraud and perjury. He could also be fined and ordered to pay restitution to his victims and forfeit any ill-gotten gains.

In a long, detailed statement delivered in a soft but steady voice, Madoff implicated no one but himself in the vast Ponzi scheme. He said he started it as a short-term way to weather the early-1990s recession and was unable to extricate himself as the years went by.

“I am actually grateful for this opportunity to publicly comment about my crimes, for which I am deeply sorry and ashamed,” Madoff said in his first public comments about his crimes since the $65 billion scandal broke in early December.Read the full story here.

A top aide to disgraced money manager Bernard Madoff had employees generate trading tickets, thought to be fake, in order to dupe investors into thinking their returns were legitimate, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday. 

According to Journal reporter Amir Efrati, Annette Bongiorno directed two assistants to research daily stock prices, at times dating back several months, and use the information to produce trading tickets that would reflect the robust returns Madoff had become famous for. 

“This is how it was done – there were all these thousands and thousands of trade confirmations puporting to sort of signify that there were trades that occurred and we know now that, obviously, there weren’t trades at least for 13 years and probably a lot longer than that – maybe decades,” Efrati told CBS News. 

Irving Picard, the court-appointed trustee charged with sorting out the Madoff mess, indicated last month that there was “no evidence to indicate securities were purchased for customer accounts.”

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Federal prosecutors said in a letter to U.S. District Judge Denny Chin Monday that they had received 78 e-mails in response to an order from Chin notifying investors of their right to be heard at any plea or sentencing hearings for the 70-year-old former Nasdaq chairman.

Chin invited victims to address the court after prosecutors submitted papers noting that crime victims have the right to be “reasonably heard at any public proceeding in the district court involving release, plea, sentencing, or any parole proceeding.”

By 4:05 p.m. Monday, prosecutors said investors had sent 11 e-mails about the acceptance of a plea from Madoff, 25 e-mails asking to speak at Thursday’s hearing, one e-mail about Madoff’s bail, 27 e-mails about sentencing and forfeiture and 14 e-mails about miscellaneous items.

The letter, signed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Lisa A. Baroni, asked that copies of the e-mails be filed under seal to protect the privacy interests of the victims.

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Both Madoffs have been represented by Ira Lee Sorkin and Daniel Horwitz at Dickstein Shapiro LLP in New York.

“She needs a new lawyer as a result of civil cases that have been filed in New York State Supreme Court,” Horwitz said. “He is named as a defendant and she is named as a defendant. They need separate counsel.”

Authorities said Madoff, 70, confessed three months ago to running a $50 billion scheme over many years on his own, bilking investors all over the world. No one else has been charged in the case.

On Thursday, Madoff is expected to plead guilty in court to criminal charges. He was arrested and charged on December 11 with one count of securities fraud, but has not yet formally answered the complaint.

Ruth Madoff’s wealth has added intrigue to the search for assets to recover money for former customers, thousands of investors from many walks of life.

Read the full story here.

Representatives of the 45-member coalition, made up of law firms from 25 nations representing some 10,000 Madoff victims, said Monday the proposal is needed to ensure the financial services market trust, transparency and legal certainty that’s been threatened by the case.

They have asked for discussion of the proposal at the April 2 London meeting of G-20 finance ministers from industrialized and developing nations.

Javier Cremades, president of the group and a partner at Spain-based Cremades & Calvo-Sotelo, said an international solutions is needed for a complex case that “is a global threat to everyone, including the governments.”

Read the full story here.