5 Ex-Madoff Employees Convicted at trial

Five former workers of imprisoned financier Bernard Madoff were convicted Monday carrying out a six-month trial in a Manhattan federal court. Yesteryear employees of Madoff’s Wall Street firm were charged with helping the former NASDAQ chairman hide a Ponzi scheme that cheated investors out of vast amounts of dollars.

The Wall Street Journal reports 5 employees face decades in prison. The paper adds:

“The end result, which comes after four days of deliberation, caps a trial that lasted more than [five] months and hands prosecutors victory within their only attempt to bring a Madoff case before a jury.

“Testimony throughout the trial showed the extent from the efforts Mr. Madoff and his employees went to disguise their fraud, everything from creating software that generated fake documents to lying to regulators and auditors.

“Computer programmers Jerome O’Hara and George Perez were found guilty of creating phony customer accounts, while portfolio managers Annette Bongiorno and JoAnn Crupi were convicted of concocting phone trading records. Daniel Bonventre, an old operations director for Mr. Madoff, helped gin up phone books and records, the jury found.”