Bernie Madoff certainly knew how to deal with Securities and Exchange Commission investigators. In a 2005 phone conversation with two officials of the Fairfield Greenwich Group, Madoff’s largest feeder fund, who were about to be questioned by SEC investigators about their firm’s relationship with Madoff, he tells associates his secret.
“You know, they [the SEC] ask you a zillion different questions and we look at them sometimes and we laugh, and we say, are you guys writing a book?” he said.
“These guys work for five years at the commission, then they become a compliance manager for a hedge fund now….or they go work for a proprietary desk. Nobody wants to stay there forever,” Madoff says of SEC staffers.
In the conversation, which lasts for 69 minutes, Madoff sets the tone with the first words out of his mouth: “Obviously, first of all, this conversation never took place, ok?”
