Bernie Madoff (2009): Guilty plea in Manhattan

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.

The docket, the SIPA liquidation, and the SEC inspector-general file are the primary sources. They describe a long-running advisory fraud that ended when redemptions in the 2008 crash exceeded cash on hand. Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities operated a legitimate market-making and proprietary-trading desk that helped computerize Nasdaq execution. Separate from that desk, an investment-advisory practice issued account statements claiming a split-strike conversion strategy and unusually smooth returns.