Free The Madoff Chronicles: Inside the Secret World of Bernie and Ruth by Brian Ross

Madoff office by a friend from Brooklyn. “If he trusted you, then he could trust who you brought.”
    Madoff had assembled a team he could trust and control. “Antisocial personalities cannot function unless they can control the people around them,” said former FBI agent Brad Garrett. “You bring in some smart guy, some CPA, he’s going to say ‘this isn’t right,’ you’re going to get caught.”
    No doubt the level of knowledge and culpability varied widely, but the seventeenth floor was the “back office” where checks from clients were processed, nonexistent trades were recorded, and the bogus monthly and quarterly account statements were prepared, printed, and mailed.
    While Madoff initially told the FBI he acted alone, someone had to generate the reams of paperwork necessary to fool clients and regulators into thinking everything was legitimate. These were the mechanics that made the scam possible. Investigators say between twenty-five and thirty employees, outside accountants, fund managers, and Madoff family members could ultimately face criminal charges for their roles, even if they did not fully understand that the entire enterprise was a scam. “It would be like the prosecution of a Mafia family using the same statutes,” said one lawyer involved in the case. “You allege a giant conspiracy, and even if you can’t prove someone knew about the Ponzi scheme, all you have to do is prove that their illegal acts contributed in some way to the overall crime.”
    Two longtime Madoff employees ran the seventeenth floor: Annette Bongiorno and Frank DiPascali. They both became multimillionaires in jobs that ordinarily pay no more than a few hundred thousand dollars a year.
    Annette started at Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities as a nineteen-year-old high school graduate in the late 1960s. She was employed as Bernie’s private secretary or “administrative assistant,” as she liked to be known.
    Annette had a team of five or six women who were responsible for preparing the monthly statements sent to clients. Many of Madoff’s longtime clients would call Annette directly with questions about their accounts, and she later would earn commissions for steering new clients to Madoff through a company called RuAnn, short for her name and that of her husband, Rudy.
    Former employees say Annette would often personally hand out the monthly statements to all those in the firm who had accounts with Madoff.
    “She was always a welcome sight because she would be bringing the good news of another great month,” said one former Madoff trader. This trader, like so many of his colleagues, lost everything when the scheme collapsed.
    Referred to as the “toad” by other people in the office because she was short and overweight, Annette was once an attractive blonde whose familiar relationship with Madoff fueled rumors about what happened between them after office hours.
    “She was a cute little thing, blond hair,” recalled Little Rick, who said he briefly went out with her.
    Madoff allowed Annette to work from her home in Florida for months at a time, and former employees said she certainly acted as if she was protected by the boss. She acted like “the queen or the she-devil,” said Little Rick, who now says she used him as a “boy toy.”
    “As they made more money, they got more and more to become, you know, assholes,” he said of Annette and others on the seventeenth floor. “Come on, for God sakes, you know, I saw you naked. Give me a break.”
    She became a multimillionaire, with a $2 million home on Long Island and another million-dollar house in a gated community in Boca Raton. FBI agents told employees she had more than $70 million in investments. Among her cars are two Mercedes Benzes and a Bentley, which sells new for $175,000. Her husband, Rudy, was an electrician for New York City’s Department of Transportation for more than twenty years. In 1996 he retired on medical disability and told