Bernie Madoff (1960): Firm founded

Bernard L. Madoff pleaded guilty in 2009 to the largest Ponzi scheme then recorded in U.S. court, after his New York investment business collapsed in December 2008. On 11 December 2008, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrested Bernard L. Madoff at his Manhattan apartment after he told senior employees that the investment-advisory arm of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC was insolvent and had been a fraud. The firm had been a fixture of Wall Street market-making; the advisory books, kept apart from that business, showed customer statements that later proved fictitious.

Madoff pleaded guilty on 12 March 2009 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to eleven felony counts, including securities fraud, investment-adviser fraud, mail and wire fraud, money laundering, false statements, perjury, making false filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and theft from an employee benefit plan. Judge Denny Chin sentenced him on 29 June 2009 to 150 years in prison and ordered forfeiture later entered as about $170 billion on the paper losses.

Irving H. Picard, appointed trustee under the Securities Investor Protection Act, spent the following decade reconstructing transfers and recovering principal for allowed claims. The case sits in the public record as a collapse of supervision as much as of a firm: the SEC’s own inspector general later documented missed warnings that had reached the agency years before the arrest.