Guess who's getting tired of being locked up in his East 64th Street penthouse, instead of jail? The Post reports that $50 billion Ponzi scheme mastermind Bernard Madoff has, according to a source, complained about his gilded cage, whining, "I'm a prisoner in my own house! I can't go anywhere! I'm stuck here all day!" Tell it to the judge who allowed you to stay at home! And lest you think Madoff can surf the Internet (and, you know, read celebrity gossip and transfer funds to off-shore accounts), his web and phone habits are being tracked.
Federal investigators are going through documents at a warehouse in East Elmhurst, Queens. Earlier this week, The Daily Beast's Lucinda Franks said there were 20 million pages of documents in the warehouse and reported it's believed Madoff's wife Ruth helped him with fake bookkeeping to keep the scam going, "No one could create that amount of paper without considerable help."
And speaking of Ruth Madoff, her father Saul Alpern "referred friends and their relatives who spent winters in North Miami Beach and summers at the Sunny Oaks Hotel in New York’s Catskill Mountains in the 1960s," Bloomberg News reports. Sunny Oaks owner Cynthia Arenson, who lost $1.25 million with Madoff, said the scammer "was doing very well. Wouldn’t you encourage your friends to invest with him? Sometimes they got 18 percent, sometimes they got 19 percent.”
The NY Times has an interesting article on how JPMorgan Chase pulled out of hedge funds that invested in Madoff. While the bank's Madoff-related losses are "pretty close to zero," the Times reports, "The bank did not notify investors of its move, and several of them are furious that it protected itself but left them holding notes that the bank itself now says are probably worthless.
