Business

MIAMI (CBS) ― Nearly ten months after Bernard Madoff's arrest, the New York Times obtained a jail house interview from official exhibits released by the Securities and Exchange Commission Friday.

Madoff openly talks about how SEC investigators missed opportunities. He said had they checked for basic information and followed through on items they had requested, the scheme would have been revealed much earlier, reports CBS station, WFOR-TV.

"I'm very proud of the role I played in the industry," he said in the interview. "Of course I destroyed that now."

He says basic fact-checking would have gotten him caught such as if investigators would have verified if he had made trades, the Times reported.

He feared he would get caught in 2004 when he feared investigators would have asked to see the account, but figured they chose not to because of his top reputation.

In 2006, investigators called to ask for the clearinghouse number, but failed to follow up and nothing ever came of it.

"After all this, I got away lucky," he said.

In turn, his victims were mostly unlucky. Investors like Stephie Halio, of Boca Raton, who lost nearly everything because of the Madoff scheme.

"It is still so shocking to me that we lost practically everything we had," Halio told WFOR's Gio Benitez.

She now finds herself struggling to keep her home.

"Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I say is this really happening? Did it happen?" Halio said.

Halio had been investing with Madoff for 25 years.

"The SEC can bumble, and the SEC and be incompetent, but they'd have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to come up with any evidence against him," Halio said.

Madoff himself says the evidence was always there. In a jailhouse interview, he told an SEC inspector that "it never entered the SEC's mind that it was a Ponzi scheme" because of "the reputation I had."

Years before, accountant Harry Markopolos had warned of Madoff's scheme, but his warnings went largely ignored.


"If they don't do their proper jobs, it's meaningless, and the people will suffer."

Halio hopes she will recover some of her money – but it might be only ten percent of what she once had.

"I just wish that the victims get the money returned to them. I don't care what happens to Bernie Madoff," Halio said.

David Kotz, the SEC inspector general, revealed in a detailed report in early September how the agency bungled five investigations of Madoff's business between June 1992 and last December, when the disgraced financier confessed.

During that time span, the SEC received six "substantive complaints that raised significant red flags" regarding Madoff's operations, according to Kotz's report. But "a thorough and competent investigation or examination was never performed."

Kotz said at the Senate hearing he recommends that Schapiro consult with agency managers "so that appropriate action ... is taken, on an employee-by-employee basis, to ensure that future examinations and investigations are conducted in a more appropriate manner" and the failures aren't repeated.

The report cited no evidence of improper ties between agency officials and Madoff, nor of senior SEC officials trying to influence the agency's probes of Madoff, who was a prominent Wall Street figure.

The New York Times and WFOR's Gio Benitez contributed to this report.

(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)

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