Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Law Humor Blogs -> Bernard Madoff

Law Humor

: Bernard Madoff

Madoff Closing Bell: Tweets from Preet

To: The Honorable Richard Sullivan
US District Court
From: Preet Bharara
US Attorney, Southern District of New York


As indicated in our letter to you in December, which has now fallen into the hands of muckrakers, allow me to re-iterate the extraordinary cooperation provide by Mr. Dimes DiPascali, and to once again impress upon Your Honor why we are seeking extraordinary lenience when Mr. DiPascali  might ultimately appear before the Court in connection with sentencing proceedings.

1. We can't recall when exactly because of a record-keeping snafu, but sometime after Mr. Madoff voluntarily contacted us, we learned that Mr. DiPascali was a trusted employee of the Madoff Empire. When we made our first visit to the Madoff office complex, we found Mr. DiPascali performing a wonderful karaoke tribute to Frank Sinatra.

2. Mr. DiPascali immediately offered to sing for us, and, per sworn affidavit provided by FBI Special Agent B.J. Kang, and FBI Special Agent Theodore Cacioppi (someone who knows a good Italian singer when he hears one), Mr. DiPascali performed as if he was Ol' Blue Eyes himself, reincarnated.

3. In subsequent interviews with Mr. DiPascali, he was kind enough to provide entrance to Mr. Madoff's offices on the 17th floor of the Lipstick Office Building, at which time, he was invaluable in pointing out the light switch in Mr. Madoff's office, which, at the time, was darkened due to the shades being pulled down.

4. Special Agents Kang and Cacioppi have sworn in affidavit that Mr. DiPascali proved integral to their locating the lone file cabinet in the corner of Mr. Madoff's private suite. And, were it not for for Mr. DiPascali pointing to the key to the cabinet, which was taped to the top drawer of of the four-foot piece of furniture with a large plant on top, Agents Kang and Cacioppi's investigation would have been severely hampered.

5. Speaking of hampers, Mr. DiPascali was equally invaluable in directing FBI agents to a laundry hamper located adjacent to Mr. Madoff's private bathroom. It was in this very hamper that FBI agents discovered soiled and grotesquely-stained underwear, which was subsequently linked by Government forensic experts to one of Mr. Madoff's sons. This particular piece of evidence is expected to be the Government's physical proof that at least one of Mr. Madoff's sons shit his pants when discovering that the Madoff scheme had been uncovered. However circumstantial, this will be the prima facie feces evidence that we believe demonstrates that one, if not both of Midas Madoff's sons were complicit in the Ponzi scheme.

6. Excuse me for diverging; the filing cabinet that would have gone undiscovered were it not for Mr. DiPascali, and more important, Agents determined that this file cabinet contained the personnel records of each of the (8) employees that worked for Mr. Madoff's 17th floor enterprise over the past 24 years. This was a veritable treasure trove of information, as those files included the actual home addresses, Social Security numbers, and even the telephone numbers of individuals that were since determined months later to be possible suspects, and perhaps even co-conspirators in Mr. Madoff's Ponzi Scheme.

Again, we submit that this type of information may have required many more months, if not years to uncover, were it not for Mr. DiPascali's cooperation.

7. In subsequent interviews with Mr. DiPascali, whom we affectionately refer to as "Dimes", he also identified a key location within the office where Agents could maintain their stock of food supplies and donuts, without any risk of said items becoming spoiled, and he assisted agents by placing the food cabinet away from the windows, where the penetrating heat might have caused the donut frosting to melt.

8. While Your Honor might view the issue of donuts to be immaterial, when asked what additional knowledge he might have, Mr. DiPascali indicated that a Madoff co-worker, a Ms. Jodi Crupi, owned a stake in a New Jersey bake shop, and this business was considered to be a superb purveyor of baked goods, including donuts, which has since proved to be a source of considerable morale for the Agents that have been working on premises in Mr. Madoff's office since December of 2008.

9. Your Honor, there are many other invaluable bites of assistance provided by Mr. DiPascali, and by virtue of the fact that he will now be more comfortably located in a $1 million condominium pending sentencing, we believe that he will be inspired to continue in his assistance in this matter.

10. As the Court is aware, the Chief of Criminal Division, Mr. Rich Zabel has continued to recuse himself from this matter, only because a few crackpots thought there would be a conflict of interest given that Mr. Zabel's father had, for years, represented one of the largest beneficiaries of Mr. Madoff's enterprise, a family that might have received more than $7 billion in false profits consequent to Mr. Madoff's scheme. With the counsel of Mr. Zabel's father, the estate of that beneficiary has since suggested that they might consider returning several, if not many dollars from the $7 billion+ of fraudulent profit they received over the years.

As such, and pending that particular settlement, along with the challenges that Mr. Picard's office has encountered in the course of clawing back from the likes of firms such as JP Morgan, you can appreciate how important Mr. DiPascali remains to the prosecution of many of our persecutions.

Respectfully,
P.Bharara

Full post as published by Bernard Madoff on February 19, 2010 (boomark / email).