Mini-Me Madoff Made Off with $350,000,000

Meet Mini-Me Madoff,  latest suspected Ponzi prince Arthur G. Nadel:

Investors – from individuals to the Sarasota YMCA Foundation — in the funds branded Viking, Valhalla and Scoop were stunned this week to learn they may be victims in what could become the largest investment swindle in Southwest Florida history.
Fund principal Arthur G. Nadel, a prominent player in Sarasota social and philanthropic circles, disappeared this week. His wife, Peg, filed a missing person report with law enforcement after finding a suicide note.

…snip…

Neil V. Moody, the president of Viking Management, declined to respond to interview requests.

In a statement issued Thursday to investors, Moody confirmed the funds appear depleted.

“Unfortunately, just yesterday afternoon we became aware of an extremely serious situation suggesting that the funds may have virtually no remaining value,” Moody wrote.

Let me get this right. They suspect he took $350,000,000, he leaves a suicide note for his wife to read and they find his car at the airport. I think it’s pretty safe to say that Mr. Nadel is not planning to bribe people in his afterlife.  At least Madoff has enough self-love to sneer daily, although most of us live for the day when he is seen peeing himself on his way to his life sentence without parole.

If you read the article cited here, you would swear ole “Art” Nadel is a saint. That kind of coverage is just plain sickening. These con men always pretend to be pillars of society and it’s downright perverse to see a news outlet list their “community service” with money they bilked from others.  You have to wonder if Mr. Nadel is carrying the Ken Lay Bilker Manual with him. Lay died on cue and then they sanctified him, discussing his generosity, phlanthropy and “Love of God”.  Ask the Enron employees and retirees he bilked how God Loving he was.  But that wasn’t insult enough.  No Sir. With his death, they dropped his charges and the family of that sack of shit got all the money and property the demon had acquired and kept. The people he ripped off got:  :::crickets:::

Now we have Nadel deciding to kill himself with $350,000,000 in tow. And his wife, who just reported him ‘missing’ just seems all broken up, doesn’t she?

Management appeared in a state of turmoil. Peg Nadel and son Geoff Quisenberry said they could not comment on the size of the company’s assets under management, the number of clients, how much has been lost, or even whether it is accurate to call them a hedge fund operator.

“The way I want to be represented is we are totally open and cooperative with all our clients and the authorities, and that includes the SEC,” Peg Nadel said. “We have nothing to hide. But until our counsel has a statement prepared for us to make public, we cannot comment on what is happening here.”

Oh I’ll just bet you cannot comment, Peg. We’ve seen this movie before.  I’ll just bet all of your property is in your name, right, Mini-Mrs. Lay? Gotta watch that “arm folding” in photos Mrs. “Art”.  Body language is everything  in times like this–and the FBI knows that.

It is truly time to make examples of these Wall Street con men and con women–starting with the SEC that seems to be really good at monitoring nothing. The problem is, it’s difficult to have any faith in our system any longer after we watched Ken Lay’s family dance off with the assets he left behind.

One other thing: I really have to ask this question:

Exactly how bright are the people who invest with con men like Nadel and actually believe they are yielding more than 8% in a Wall Street crashing environment? Where on earth do they think these people are investing their money? Here’s one of them. Not for anything, sir, but didn’t you feel at least a teeny tiny bit suspicious in the current market environment?:

He said he invested $500,000 in the Viking IRA Fund three years ago, and through November it had grown to $729,844. The fund managers claimed the fund had earned 8.56 percent in 2008, down only in October, during a year when Wall Street suffered catastrophic losses.