NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — In his first in depth prison interview since his arrest in December 2008, convicted financier Bernard Madoff claimed he did not act alone in orchestrating a Ponzi scheme that wiped out entire fortunes.

 

Madoff said the banks and hedge funds he dealt with over years employed a “willful blindness” – a failure to conduct normal scrutiny. He told the New York Times he’s relayed that information to Irving Picard, the trustee currently trying to recover assets for Madoff’s victims.

 

“I am saying that the banks and funds were complicit in one form or another and my information to Picard when he was here, established this,” Madoff said.

“They had to know. But the attitude was sort of, if you’re doing something wrong, we dont want to know,” he added. 

Madoff was currently serving a 150-year sentence in a North Carolina federal prison. He described living in a 12-foot cell with a roommate and a window overlooking the prison grounds.

 

That limited, narrow view of the world and his strictly-controlled environment haven’t hampered Madoff’s ability to follow his own case.  He said New York Mets owners Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz – named in one of the trustee’s many lawsuits – were not in or aware of the scheme.

 

“They knew nothing. They knew nothing,” he said.

 

Perhaps Madoff’s most provocative comment pertains to his apparent lack of remorse. Of those clients who lost millions, he said “I would have loved for them to not lose anything, but that was a risk they were well aware of by investing in the market.”

 

Source: CBSNewYork