He was king of the Ponzi scheme — and the F-bomb.
Bernie Madoff ran a foul-mouthed workplace in which the arch fraudster was the “maestro of obscenities,” one of his former staffers told jurors on Thursday.
Former administrator assistant Winifier Jackson testified that F-bombs and other curse words were exchanged with reckless abandon at Madoff Securities — especially by the imprisoned con man and his longtime secretary, who is on trial for fraud.
While being questioned by prosecutors, Jackson, 45, said secretary Annette Bongiorno — whom she reported to — was sometimes a generous boss but also could “be very mean” — and would repeatedly shout curse words at her if work wasn’t up to satisfaction.
Recalling one such example, Jackson said Bongiorno shouted to her “what the F–k are you doing?” after Jackson “made an error on something.”
After being cross-examined by Bongiorno’s lawyer Roland Riopelle, Jackson revealed that the short, portly secretary seriously loved her “snacks” — especially Entenmann’s treats — after jurors were shown a 2008 photo of Bongiorno’s workspace that included a box pound cake on one of her two desks.
The photo also showed Bongiorno’s computer decorated with a cut-out photo of Tweety Bird and her wall draped with holiday cards and a photo collage of predominantly children’s pictures.
Regarding Bongiorno’s filthy vocabulary, Riopelle got Jackson to admit Madoff Securities was filled with many other foul mouths – especially the big boss himself. When asked whether Madoff was a “maestro of obscenities,” she answered “yes.”
Jackson worked more than 20 years for Madoff before he and his operation at the Lipstick Building in Manhattan were busted by the feds in December 2008. For much of that time, she worked on the building’s 17th floor where prosecutors say all the shady dealings went on — apparently under Jackson’s nose.
The feds presented Jackson to help strengthen their case that both Bongiorno and another ex-Madoff staffer on trial, former account manager Joann Crupi, spent much of their time going through media reports for stock prices while thinking up lies to tell investors.
She testified how her job included looking up historical stock prices on a Bloomberg terminal that could be backdated and punched into false customer-account statements.
However, she later wound up shooting down a key piece of evidence by the government against Bongiorno.
Prosecutors showed a 2007 statement of a Madoff account with the philanthropic Picower Foundation that Bongiorno scribbled “old sales and new buys and fake sales” atop the page. But Jackson minutes later answered “no” after Riopelle followed up by asking if she thought anything “nefarious” was going on relating to the “fake sales” phrase.
The other ex-Madoff staffers on trial are operations chief Daniel Bonventre and computer programmers George Perez and Jerome O’Hara.
Yahoo Local News – New York Post
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