Mesmerizing Crime Stories

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Bernie Madoff’s Giant Ponzi Scheme

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In the Bernie Madoff case, the Securities and Exchange Commission violated the “holy grail” of forensic accounting investigation. In too many instances, they trusted Madoff’s false wall of integrity, but did not verify the information he gave them. Been there, done that. Not only were the SEC’s relatively inexperienced, undertrained, and naive investigators charmed by Madoff, but they were incapable of properly handling a white-collar crime investigation. A criminal’s job is to take advantage of your trust, your morals, your character, and your ethics. Madoff was a serial economic predator for 20 years and the only reason he stopped was because he got caught. He didn’t get caught because of the SEC and the auditors. It was our imploding financial system. More than three quarters of these kinds of schemes are found out not during the execution but during the implosion. The SEC has less than one 10th of the power as the NYPD and they have to police the capital markets. That’s why we’re going to continue having these crimes over and over again. We had skimmed money for about 15 years before we went public at Crazy Eddie. After we went public, we just put back some of our skimmed money as sales. Just like the SEC with Madoff, our auditors never really followed the money. Our auditors trusted but didn’t really verify, when they should have not trusted and only verified.

Antar is the former CFO of Crazy Eddie and was responsible, along with his cousin, for one of the largest securities frauds in U.S. history.

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