He is the treasurer of Yeshiva University's Board of Trustees. He is also the chairman of YU's Sy Syms School of Business.
Yesterday he was arrested for a $50 billion dollar securities fraud.
Today…
Photograph of Bernard l. Madoff found through a Google image search on Yu's website. The photograph does not appear on any YU web page that displays naturally, and is only visible through a Google image search or Google cache.
…his name and photograph are missing from their prominent spots on YU's website, almost as if they had never been there.
And the New York Times, which reported Bernard L. Madoff's connection to YU, removed that information from its online story about his arrest.
But Bernard L. Madoff is the chairman of YU's Board of Trustees, and he is the treasurer of YU's Sy Syms School of Business.
Here is proof:
All images that follow can be clicked to enlarge.
YU's Board of Trustees as displayed live on its website at 3:30 am 12-12-08:
Below is that same page with my browser's "search within this page" function used to search for "Madoff."
What you see is that YU changed the color of the type for his name and the word treasurer to white to make Madoff's name 'disappear.' Apparently the page formatting was too complex for a quick, complete excision of his name:
Below is the Google cache of the same page, dated Dec 3, 2008 03:54:15 GMT.
This is a 'picture' of the webpage taken by Google at that date and time. Highlighted text is the term I searched for, "Bernard L. Madoff."
(Note "Madoff" appears in the exact same location as it does on the screenshot immediately above.)
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Here is YU's Sy Syms School of Business annual dinner chairman's welcome page as it displayed live at 3:30 am 12-12-08. It is blank:
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Here is the Google cache of that same page as it displayed Dec 3, 2008 13:11:18 GMT:
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Here is a screenshot of the Google cache with the full text showing:
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In happier times; Madoff at YU's 79th Hanukkah Dinner in 2003:
The Times fact checkers – not known to be adept at catching Internet scams like this – apparently pulled references to Madoff's YU connection.
Here is what the Times article originally said:
…The company had around $300 million in assets in 2000 at the height of the Internet bubble and ranked among the top trading and securities firms in the nation. Mr. Madoff ran the business with several family-members including his brother Peter, his nephew Charles, his niece, Shana and his sons Mark and Andrew.
Reached at his office, Peter Madoff declined to comment.
The alleged scheme apparently involved an asset-management unit of Madoff Securities, which Mr. Madoff started after the market-making business became difficult once stocks started being quoted in decimals instead of fractions
Mr. Madoff is currently on the board of Nasdaq OMX Group, formerly the Nasdaq Stock Market, and serves as the chairman of the Sy Syms School of Business at Yeshiva University. His son Mark Madoff served as the vice chairman of the Board of Directors of the National Association of Securities Dealers Inc., from 1993 to 1994 and was also an board member of brokerage firm A.G. Edwards.
His firm, which at one point was the largest market maker on the electronic Nasdaq Stock Market, employed hundreds of traders.
But this entire close of the article is now missing, and the now article ends this way:
…By the early 1980s, his firm was one of the largest independent trading operations in the securities industry. The company had around $300 million in assets in 2000 at the height of the Internet bubble and ranked among the top trading and securities firms in the nation.
Mr. Madoff ran the business with several family members, including his brother Peter, his nephew Charles, his niece Shana and his sons Mark and Andrew.
The text of the original article:
Prominent Trader Accused of Defrauding Clients
By DIANA B. HENRIQUES and ZACHERY KOUWE
Bernard L. Madoff, a legend among Wall Street traders, was arrested on Thursday morning by federal agents and charged with criminal securities fraud stemming from his company’s money management business.
The arrest and criminal complaint were confirmed just before 6 p.m. Thursday by Lev L. Dassin, the acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan, and Mark Mershon, the assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
According to the complaint, Mr. Madoff advised colleagues at the firm on Wednesday that his investment advisory business was “all just one big lie” that was “basically, a giant Ponzi scheme” that, by his estimate, had lost $50 billion over many years.
Related accusations were made in a lawsuit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission in federal court in Manhattan. That complaint accuses Mr. Madoff of defrauding advisory clients of his firm and seeks emergency relief to protect potential victims, including an asset freeze and the appointment of a receiver for the firm.
“We are alleging a massive fraud — both in terms of scope and duration,” said Linda Chatman Thomsen, director of the S.E.C. enforcement division. “We are moving quickly and decisively to stop the fraud and protect remaining assets for investors.”
Another regulator, Andrew M. Calamari, the associate director of enforcement in the New York Regional S.E.C. Office, said the case involved “a stunning fraud that appears to be of epic proportions.”
Although not a household name among consumers, Mr. Madoff’s firm has played a significant role in the structure of Wall Street for decades, both in traditional stock trading and in the development of newer electronic networks for trading equities and derivatives.
The S.E.C.’s complaint, filed in federal court in Manhattan, alleges that Mr. Madoff informed two senior employees on Wednesday that his investment advisory business was a fraud. Mr. Madoff told these employees that he was “finished,” that he had “absolutely nothing .”
The senior employees understood him to be saying that he had for years been paying returns to certain investors out of the principal received from other, different investors. Mr. Madoff admitted in this conversation that the firm was insolvent and had been for years, and that he estimated the losses from this fraud were at least $50 billion, according to the regulatory complaint.
Mr. Madoff, 70, founded Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities in 1960 and liked to recount how he had earned his initial stake by working as a life guard at city beaches and installing underground sprinkler systems. By the early 1980s, his firm was one of the largest independent trading operations in the securities industry.
The company had around $300 million in assets in 2000 at the height of the Internet bubble and ranked among the top trading and securities firms in the nation. Mr. Madoff ran the business with several family-members including his brother Peter, his nephew Charles, his niece, Shana and his sons Mark and Andrew.
Reached at his office, Peter Madoff declined to comment.
The alleged scheme apparently involved an asset-management unit of Madoff Securities, which Mr. Madoff started after the market-making business became difficult once stocks started being quoted in decimals instead of fractions
Mr. Madoff is currently on the board of Nasdaq OMX Group, formerly the Nasdaq Stock Market, and serves as the chairman of the Sy Syms School of Business at Yeshiva University. His son Mark Madoff served as the vice chairman of the Board of Directors of the National Association of Securities Dealers Inc., from 1993 to 1994 and was also an board member of brokerage firm A.G. Edwards.
His firm, which at one point was the largest market maker on the electronic Nasdaq Stock Market, employed hundreds of traders.
The text of the edited article, as it appeared at 4 am 12-12-08:
Prominent Trader Accused of Defrauding Clients
By DIANA B. HENRIQUES and ZACHERY KOUWE
On Wall Street, his name is legendary. With money he had made as a lifeguard on the beaches of Long Island, he built a trading powerhouse that had prospered for more than four decades. At age 70, he had become an influential spokesman for the traders who are the hidden gears of the marketplace.
But on Thursday morning, this consummate trader, Bernard L. Madoff, was arrested at his Manhattan home by federal agents who accused him of running a multibillion-dollar fraud scheme — perhaps the largest in Wall Street’s history.
Regulators have not yet verified the scale of the fraud. But the criminal complaint filed against Mr. Madoff on Thursday in federal court in Manhattan reports that he estimated the losses at $50 billion. “We are alleging a massive fraud — both in terms of scope and duration,” said Linda Chatman Thomsen, director of the enforcement division at the Securities and Exchange Commission. “We are moving quickly and decisively to stop the fraud and protect remaining assets for investors.”
Andrew M. Calamari, an associate director for enforcement in the S.E.C.’s regional office in New York, said the case involved “a stunning fraud that appears to be of epic proportions.”
According to his lawyers, Mr. Madoff was released on a $10 million bond. “Bernie Madoff is a longstanding leader in the financial services industry,” said Daniel Horwitz, one of his lawyers. “He will fight to get through this unfortunate set of events.”
Mr. Madoff’s brother and business colleague, Peter Madoff, declined to comment on the case or discuss its implications for the Madoff firm, which at one point was the largest market maker on the electronic Nasdaq market, regularly operating as both a buyer and seller of a host of widely traded securities. The firm employed hundreds of traders.
There was some worry on Wall Street that Mr. Madoff’s fall would shake more foundations than his own.
According to the most recent federal filings, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, the firm he founded in 1960, operated more than two dozen funds overseeing $17 billion.
These funds have been widely marketed to wealthy investors, hedge funds and other institutional customers for more than a decade, although an S.E.C. filing in the case said the firm reported having 11 to 23 clients at the beginning of this year.
At the request of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a federal judge appointed a receiver on Thursday evening to secure the Madoff firm’s overseas accounts and warned the firm not to move any assets until he had ruled on whether to freeze the assets.
A hearing on that request is scheduled for Friday.
Regulators said they hoped to have a clearer picture of the losses facing investors by that court hearing.
“We have 16 examiners on site all day and through the night poring over the records,” said Mr. Calamari of the S.E.C.
The Madoff funds attracted investors with the promise of high returns and low fees. One of Mr. Madoff’s more prominent funds, the Fairfield Sentry fund, reported having $7.3 billion in assets in October and claimed to have paid more than 11 percent interest each year through its 15-year track record.
Competing hedge fund managers have wondered privately for years how Mr. Madoff generated such high returns, in bull markets and bear, given the generally low-yielding investment strategies he described to his clients.
“The numbers were too good to be true, for too long,” said Girish Reddy, a managing director at Prisma Partners, an investment firm that invests in hedge funds. “And the supporting infrastructure was weak.” Mr. Reddy said his firm had looked at the Madoff funds but decided against investing in them because their performance was too consistently positive, even in times when the market was incredibly volatile.
But the essential drama is a personal one — one laid out in the dry language of a criminal complaint by Lev L. Dassin, the acting United States attorney in Manhattan, and a regulatory lawsuit filed by the S.E.C. According to those documents, the first alarm bells rang at the firm on Tuesday, when Mr. Madoff told a senior executive he wanted to pay his employees their annual bonuses in December, two months early.
Just days earlier, Mr. Madoff had told another senior executive he was struggling to raise cash to cover about $7 billion in requested withdrawals from his clients, and he had appeared “to have been under great stress in the prior weeks,” according to the S.E.C. complaint.
So on Wednesday, the senior executive visited Mr. Madoff’s office, maintained on a separate floor with records kept under lock and key, and asked for an explanation.
Instead, Mr. Madoff invited the two executives to his Manhattan apartment that evening. When they joined him there, he told them that his money-management business was “all just one big lie” and “basically, a giant Ponzi scheme.”
The senior employees understood him to be saying that he had for years been paying returns to certain investors out of the cash received from other investors.
In that conversation, according to the criminal complaint, Mr. Madoff “stated that he was ‘finished,’ that he had ‘absolutely nothing.’ ”
By this account, Mr. Madoff told the executives he intended to surrender to the authorities in about a week but first wanted to distribute approximately $200 million to $300 million to “certain selected employees, family and friends.”
On Thursday morning, however, he was arrested on a single count of securities fraud, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a maximum fine of $5 million.
According to the S.E.C., Mr. Madoff confessed to an F.B.I. agent that there was “no innocent explanation” for his behavior and he expected to go to jail. He had lost money on his trades, he told the agent, and had “paid investors with money that wasn’t there.”
Although not a household name, Mr. Madoff’s firm has played a significant role in the structure of Wall Street for decades, both in traditional stock trading and in the development of newer electronic networks for trading equities and derivatives.
In building those new trading networks, his firm had formed partnerships with some of the largest brokerage businesses on Wall Street, including Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch.
Mr. Madoff founded Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities in 1960 and liked to tell interviewers about earning his initial stake by working as a lifeguard at city beaches and installing underground sprinkler systems.
By the early 1980s, his firm was one of the largest independent trading operations in the securities industry. The company had around $300 million in assets in 2000 at the height of the Internet bubble and ranked among the top trading and securities firms in the nation.
Mr. Madoff ran the business with several family members, including his brother Peter, his nephew Charles, his niece Shana and his sons Mark and Andrew.
Vikas Bajaj and Gretchen Morgenson contributed reporting.
So, why the changes?
What is missing from the new version are for the the most part Madoff's connection to YU, and other family associations.
While it could be argued his son's connection to the National Association of Securities Dealers should be removed because the son is not charged with a crime and the association listed is 15 years old.
But Bernard L. Madoff's associations are news, especially if they pertain to business or training for business. That is especially true if those associations are current. And this would be even more heightened if those associations are intertwined with religion or morality.
(Imagine if Bernard L. Madoff was affiliated with Oral Roberts University, or an Evangelical school of business, or if Madoff was the chairman of the Board of Trustees oft Catholic University – or if he were the chairman of the Board of Trustees of the American Society of Atheists.
The connection would be news.)
Either the Times was duped, or the Times has a lot of explaining to do.
[Hat Tip for the Times "edit": Yoel B.]