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NEW YORK The former chief financial officer for Bernard Madoff pleaded guilty Tuesday to conspiracy, admitting to helping Madoff carry out a massive fraud that cost thousands of people billions of dollars by lying to investors.
“I was loyal to him. I ended up being loyal to a terrible, terrible fault,” Frank DiPascali said as he pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Manhattan to charges including securities fraud, falsifying records and international money laundering.
The plea to charges that carry a potential penalty of up to 125 years in prison came with a cooperation deal that could get him leniency at sentencing.
Madoff is serving 150 years in prison for a Ponzi scheme that demolished thousands of people's life savings, wrecked charities and shook confidence in the financial system.
Customers say DiPascali, 52, was their main contact with Madoff's firm, a fact he admitted as he confessed to the 10 charges contained in a criminal information charging document.
He said he began working for Madoff in 1975, just after he finished high school, and had joined Madoff in his fraud by the 1980s or early 1990s. He said he knew then that he and Madoff were promising investors that transactions were being made that were not.
DiPascali says the transactions were “all fake. It was all fictitious. It was wrong, and I knew it was wrong at the time.”
