This is why I f*cking hate this place sometimes. The article, when submitted, matched my headline. Now it doesn't.

Yeah, I'll blame Yahoo news for their usual, but fark has gotten a whole helluva lot less fun and interesting over the years due to the influx of douchebag commenters.

/subby

He could end up being a Big Ol' Hero to much of the inhabitants of that prison. I had a cousin who shot his wife's divorce lawyer in Tennessee (didn't kill him, just wounded him), and they sent him to Brushy Mountain, the most hard-core prison in TN. He was in his early 60s, and you'd think he'd have been a vulnerable old guy, but he ended up being treated like a king the entire 7 years he was in, simply because he'd shot a lawyer and that was considered a wonderful thing to do. Maybe the boys down in NC will think it was a cool thing to have financially snookered a bunch of rich Manhattanites.

NikolaiFarkoff: This is why I f*cking hate this place sometimes. The article, when submitted, matched my headline. Now it doesn't.

Yeah, I'll blame Yahoo news for their usual, but fark has gotten a whole helluva lot less fun and interesting over the years due to the influx of douchebag commenters.

/subby

If only there was a place where you could post news items and not let anyone comment on them...

medius: OldManDownDRoad: Jesus, guys, update your shiat. Madoff has been in Butner Federal Correctional Complex ^ since this morning.

/w Jonathan Pollard
//and Omar Abdel-Rahman

I visited Butner once. Made the mistake of wearing a blue short sleeve button down shirt, white t-shirt, khakis and white tennis shoes. (Yep, that's exactly what the inmates wore.)

lulz.

I've been there a couple times on business. The compound is pretty safe, but the old Army barracks and training fields are FULL of copperheads. Makes the place pretty escape-proof.

There's a medical/psych ward there as well. Apparently people with, er, sexual problems end up there - it's max security. Perhaps Bernie will end up with PedoBear.

/John Hinckley was in the psych ward for a short while

In NC now, north of Raleigh
Link

Beeblebrox: NikolaiFarkoff: This is why I f*cking hate this place sometimes. The article, when submitted, matched my headline. Now it doesn't.

Yeah, I'll blame Yahoo news for their usual, but fark has gotten a whole helluva lot less fun and interesting over the years due to the influx of douchebag commenters.

/subby

If only there was a place where you could post news items and not let anyone comment on them...

CBS Evening News? Oh, but you wanted people to actually see them . .

Reporting by Grant McCool

Hehe. Nice.

PatientZero: Nick Nostril: So they finally found a crazy homeless dude that looks enough like Bernie to pass for Inmate Bernie?

/Bernie's in the South Pacific
//folks with that kind of cash snookered away don't go to jail

Yeah, THIS.

Him and Ken Lay are probably laughing their assess off.

eqtworld: All I am really saying is I would like to see the numbers and where the money went and how bad it was.


GIS 'boobs'.

OldManDownDRoad:

apparently the inmates were trading cigarettes for me while we were touring the compound

John Hinckley was in the psych ward for a short while

I remember seeing a poster where my dad worked with Hinckley holding a gun to his head captioned: "Hinckley. He's had a shot at the man, let's give him a shot at the job."

When the hell did Butner North Carolina move to Georgia? Gee subby you goofed that one.

The prision is out near a few roads that are nice to ride and a National Guard training camp. If we are lucky he will step on leftover WW2 bomb from the range the prison was built upon.

/welcome. farker.

bigtony99: Build a 60 ft. wall around I-285, then fill it with water. End of problem...

Watch yer cornhole, bud!

not nice at all...
/ATL, that is..
//born and raised

Only temporary until they ship him to North Carolina where he will stay for the duration.

bigtony99: Build a 60 ft. wall around I-285, then fill it with water. End of problem...


that would be some nasty water

Link (new window)

He is in NC. Or maybe it is a disinformation tactic while 'they' ship him to a cave.

It's time for...

I'll buy any inmate or guard in the prison a beer for every time they beat the shiat out of him.

They should tell those ignorant savages that he's the cause of the recession. Just another stab target for them.

Has anyone yet pointed out that he's really in NC and not Atlanta? 'Cause I don't think anyone has pointed that out yet.

Looks like he got some help from the magician, subby.

HereNorThere: Oops, turns out he was in Atlanta temporarily. Would have been nice to have seen him on a chain gang.

For some reason, that started this weird Al-ish parody in my head that goes something like "That's the sound of a banker working on a chain gang (oof! oy!)"

Fundamental Thereom Of Farkulus: man, how much would it suck to roll up in front of a medium security prison and know that you were gonna die in that building. holy shiat.

/medium security prisons are NOT good...exponentially worse than minimums...

Seriously, man. I just visited a client who was in detention at a facility not unlike the one Madoff is going to, and it's depressing as f*ck.

The security precautions are incredible, the massive amounts of barb/razor wire around the place completely suck away any hope you might have walking into the place, and the guards don't play. I definitely appreciated my freedom when I was walking out of the place.

Bernie is going to hold his own initially, then he's going to get beat down or raped, and soon thereafter attempt to take his own life because it's just too much for him to handle. I'd almost put money on it.

And I won't care one wit.

Fundamental Thereom Of Farkulus: man, how much would it suck to roll up in front of a medium security prison and know that you were gonna die in that building. holy shiat.

they have a min security facility there. The TFA only says he's at the prison not what unit, min or med security he's going to.

For some reason this reminds me of that movie Big Stan, where a rich conman goes to prison, only in this case I doubt anyone will be there to teach Madoff how to make nunchaku out of four bars of soap and a shoe lace.

I don't understand why more people aren't trying the same thing Bernie did.

Let's think about this for a second
The most common number tossed about for losses in Bernie's Ponzi scheme is fifty billion dollars. Let's assume the shiatbags reporting those numbers really meant to say five billion. That works out to thirty million per year. I would do a year for thirty million. I would do a year for five million. Bernie got the deal of a lifetime, and his sons (probably just as culpable) are unlikely to do more than token sentences if anything at all. The whole Madoff family got a deal that may be the sweetest one ever handed out by the US justice system.

People who sell a thousand dollar's worth of drugs could get a similar sentence under the absurd sentencing guidelines. I think the same sentence should be applied to every single regulator who gave Bernie a pass. It should be obvious to everyone that either the SEC is grossly incompetent on a colossal scale, or it is full of Bernie's fellow criminals.

Neither explanation is acceptable to me.

Shakespeare's Monkey: I wonder what the under over is that he'll meet up with someone who's family lost money because of him.

Probably nil to zilch (although to tell the truth, I don't exactly understand what an under-over is). But Bernie took money mostly from his own people (the Joos), who probably make up a very tiny percentage of the incarcerated population down there.

Also, you had to give him $10 mil to start, and even then, he was apparently quite picky about whom he would accept into his exclusive club. You could become one of the "lucky" few only by referral and he turned down a lot of people. In hindsight, when everything looks completely different, obviously, it seems he may have been turning down those candidates he was afraid might understand too much about how the market worked and might start asking too many questions, something he obviously did not want to encourage. so he turned down anyone with any connection to finance or banking, etc.

In short, I don't think he's going to run into a lot of people who know too much about his story, and I highly doubt he's going to run into anyone who's been affected by him - and who then somehow ended up going to prison for some reason themselves.

OTOH, his wife is running into his victims everywhere she turns. Her hairstylist already called and told her she can't come back to the salon anymore because other customers were furious. Her florist dropped her, and the other night she went out for dinner with her niece at California Pizza Kitchen, and other diners recognized and booed her. I can't picture her staying in New York much longer because there's really no place she can go without running into people who know her and hate her with a fury that has no limits. Any type of place she would go to - health club, temple, shopping - would be filled with her own type of people, and her own type of people are the ones Bernie screwed over. Pretty much everyone is convinced there's no way she had no idea what was going on.

Maybe they let him stop by the Atlanta pen because the BEST bbq joint around is right up the street.

IXI Jim IXI: Tricky Chicken: Isn't this in the Delaware/Rhode Island complex of 'States that don't matter?'

Well, we can't all be in states that aren't states...

Touche, I was just going for the wholegeographicmashup disregard for actual locations thing. Although on my childhood puzzle, DC/MD/VA/DE were one piece, and everything north of NY was another piece. That is how I learned my geography, and the colors of all the states. I don't know about all this red/blue state junk. There were 5-6 red states and about the same blue states. The rest were yellow, green, purple and orange.

ll001: I don't understand why more people aren't trying the same thing Bernie did.

Let's think about this for a second
The most common number tossed about for losses in Bernie's Ponzi scheme is fifty billion dollars. Let's assume the shiatbags reporting those numbers really meant to say five billion. That works out to thirty million per year. I would do a year for thirty million. I would do a year for five million. Bernie got the deal of a lifetime, and his sons (probably just as culpable) are unlikely to do more than token sentences if anything at all. The whole Madoff family got a deal that may be the sweetest one ever handed out by the US justice system.

People who sell a thousand dollar's worth of drugs could get a similar sentence under the absurd sentencing guidelines. I think the same sentence should be applied to every single regulator who gave Bernie a pass. It should be obvious to everyone that either the SEC is grossly incompetent on a colossal scale, or it is full of Bernie's fellow criminals.

Neither explanation is acceptable to me.

Lots of people try it all the time.

The problem is keeping it going as long as he did as getting it as big as he did.

I think he managed it because his payout rate was relatively low, (15%/year) as opposed to the ridiculous rates (100%+) that most other ponzi schemes use. It was just above the long term market average, so knowledgeable people were more easily able to convince themselves that he was either a very good money manager, or whatever cheating he was doing, he was doing to someone else.

The second part of that is why I'm not terribly worked up about this. A lot of investors were fairly sure that he was doing something unethical if not illegal, they just assumed that the victims were on the other end of the trades he was doing.

ll001: I don't understand why more people aren't trying the same thing Bernie did.

Let's think about this for a second
The most common number tossed about for losses in Bernie's Ponzi scheme is fifty billion dollars. Let's assume the shiatbags reporting those numbers really meant to say five billion. That works out to thirty million per year. I would do a year for thirty million. I would do a year for five million. Bernie got the deal of a lifetime, and his sons (probably just as culpable) are unlikely to do more than token sentences if anything at all. The whole Madoff family got a deal that may be the sweetest one ever handed out by the US justice system.

People who sell a thousand dollar's worth of drugs could get a similar sentence under the absurd sentencing guidelines. I think the same sentence should be applied to every single regulator who gave Bernie a pass. It should be obvious to everyone that either the SEC is grossly incompetent on a colossal scale, or it is full of Bernie's fellow criminals.

Neither explanation is acceptable to me.

Remember the losses are the shortfall in the accounts outstanding at the end of the scheme - this doesn't mean he skimmed off $50b himself as plenty of people withdrew cash during that time, and the debt was building up.

For example if 10 years ago he had $10b "invested" in his funds and he claimed a 15% return that year (which is the around the levels he generally claimed I think) that is $1.5b more in shortfall that his fund now has if everyone tried to withdraw all their cash than the year before, so you can see how quickly a $50b shortfall would build up, even if he wasn't taking any out himself. He had plenty of cash from his legimate businesses that could have supported his apparent lifestyle, so it seems most likely that the majority of any cash he siphoned off the scheme is hidden somewhere.

Presumably the FBI or SEC or whoever is investigating could probably work out the flow of all the funds if the description of the office that the scam was run from, but that it is likely to take quite a while. Only then might they be able to put a figure on how much had disappeared over the years.

bigtony99: Build a 60 ft. wall around I-285, then fill it with water. End of problem...

Already been tried. Katrina anyone?

Weaver95: He better hope they put him in protected custody. Bernie pissed off a LOT of people.


Yeah, people who thought he was stealing from somebody other than themselves. His returns were simply too good to be true. I have seen more than one interview with "victims" who go all fuzzy and defensive when asked how they thought Bernie could have been making money that nobody else could make.

If the housing bubble had not have burst, Bernie could have kept his Ponzi engine running until after his death. The man was a genius, able to harness the power of greed like few others.

Quite frankly, I don't see any fundamental difference between what Bernie did and what Wall Street, AIG, Enron et al have been doing for years - which is running a Ponzi scheme. Goldman and AIG set out to profit from a scheme they knew would eventually collapse.

Good thing we have Bernie Madoff to distract us from that fact.

From TFA: "the prison, 45 miles northwest of Raleigh, North Carolina"

Yeah, make that northeast of Raleigh.

stolenplates: Yeah, make that northeast of Raleigh.

if you're taking the long way

Apik0r0s: Weaver95: He better hope they put him in protected custody. Bernie pissed off a LOT of people.


Yeah, people who thought he was stealing from somebody other than themselves. His returns were simply too good to be true. I have seen more than one interview with "victims" who go all fuzzy and defensive when asked how they thought Bernie could have been making money that nobody else could make.

If the housing bubble had not have burst, Bernie could have kept his Ponzi engine running until after his death. The man was a genius, able to harness the power of greed like few others.

Quite frankly, I don't see any fundamental difference between what Bernie did and what Wall Street, AIG, Enron et al have been doing for years - which is running a Ponzi scheme. Goldman and AIG set out to profit from a scheme they knew would eventually collapse.

Good thing we have Bernie Madoff to distract us from that fact.

Don't forget Michael Jackson's funeral, Posh spice and Beckham, Britney Spears, etc., that are so much more important to most Americans than what is happening that will affect them in ways they won't notice until it is too late.

Sticky Hands: The problem is keeping it going as long as he did as getting it as big as he did.

The problem is that Madoff is a greedy dumbass. The first billion or so that I saw I would have been GONE and in a non-extradition country with a private army and fortified compound. And then lived like a King the rest of my life laughing at the dipshiats that gave me cash

Shhhhhhh, everyone! Subby is studying for his chance to be on Jeopardy. He's just GETTING to Geography, now...

oh, damn it. I didn't want him coming to my state!