Bernie Madoff
Bernie Madoff By Michael Dickson 1/24/2009 In our countries history there have been many people that have done a lot of unethical things when it comes to finances. Back in 1920 a man named Charles Ponzi began advertising that he could make a 50% return for investors in only 45 days. Many people believed in this and began to mortgageoff their homes and all of their lives savings. As all of the information became public that he had a criminal history people began to question his judgment. All of them were correct and he was indicted on 86 counts of fraud and tens of millions of dollars were gone. After this happened anyone caught swindling money from incent investors would be know as to have pulled a Ponzi scam. No one our nation has every beaten what Charles Ponzi until 2008. Bernie Madoff has been charged and convictedof pulling off the largest financial scam every by taking over $50 billion over a course of decades from people that trusted him to invest and give large returns. But who is the man that earned this trust and where did he come from? Mr. Madoff had a business installing and fixing sprinklersystems but he saved money and with only $5,000 he joined the ranks of Wall Street in the late 1960’s. With his very small firm he got his start by matching buyers of inexpensive “penny stocks” with sellers in the growing market. But in the late 1970’s his firms and those like his got the opportunity to start trading prestigious blue-chip stocks and the rest became history. He started cultivating key relationships with regulators which in turn gave him the upper hand when it came to staying under the radar of the S.E.C. When he worked hard to adopt new trading technologies in the 1990’s he became the head of NASDAQ. Mr. Madoff had an attitude of using the mantra of “kiss” when it came to his employees and wanted everything completely organized and always looking like a top notch operation. So with all of this prestigewhat happed with him to just