Ever since the story broke last week that Bernard Madoff had lost perhaps $50 billion of investments entrusted to him by friends, hedge funds, charities, etc., I’ve been looking for the answers to a few questions. When and how did it first go wrong? Was there one leveraged investment that went bad back before 1999, when the SEC first “investigated”? Did he dig himself out of that hole only to fall into another one or has he been producing bogus statements steadily since then? Who on the inside of the company was aware of the fraud? And what was...
