âWell, try painstaking research, lots of waiting around, mounds of paperwork.â âThe volunteers piled up mounds of rubbish, including old prams, gates and fences and hoped the Council would remove it.â âPlus, there's a mound of leftover gravel from our deck landscaping project.â
For other people with the same surname, see Madoff (surname). For the miniseries, see Madoff (miniseries). Bernard Lawrence Bernie Madoff (/ËmeÉªdÉf/; born April 29, 1938) is an American fraudster and a former stockbroker, investment advisor, and financier. He is the former non-executive chairman of the NASDAQ stock market, and the admitted operator of a Ponzi scheme that is considered the largest financial fraud in U.S. history.
How Ponzi Schemes Work. Bernie Madoff pulled off a wildly successful Ponzi scheme before things started to unravel and he fessed up in 2008. In December 2008, Bernard Madoff revealed that the asset management arm of his firm, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, was just one big lie [source: Henriques]. In what he described as a Ponzi scheme, it's estimated he took his investors for a cool $65 billion over the course of nearly two decades.