Packing and Shipping Money with Bernie Madoff

Packing and Shipping Money with Bernie Madoff Advice from the Best Lawyers on Capital Hill and Their Wall Street Lawyer Friends on How to Pack and Ship Money Lex Loeb Contributor Network . When in doubt about the law call a Senator who came from a law firm. If you don't want to be charged $2400 an hour on a 4 minute minimum basis for advice just ask a hypothetical question or two like" How do you think Bernie Madoff would have laundered all that money?" That is a subject no great lawyer should be able to resist even if you are paying for lunch on separate checks, "Well if I were Bernie....here is what I would have done...or rather what I might have advised him to do." Free financial legal advice at last! "It all depends on how good your Ponzi scam is. If you expect it to remain undetected for 20 years or more you can really have fun with it. Life is so short that you really should pay attention to money. A quality scam first and then after that you can create a scam within a scam. What I would have done is fun a phony ponzi scheme for an under the table tax free fee. I suspect Bernie may have lots of co-conspirators, ten sets of financial records planted for authorities to discover and the only real records locked away in his head with a physician's note that he is beginning to suffer from senility an Alzheimer's disease. " That was about a minute's worth of advice that would have ordinarily cost me $40. The attorney goes on, " I would have structured my fake ponzi scheme as a kick back system for the rich and super rich to both permanently shield assets from income taxes and allow them to tap into non profit trust money for personal cash reserves. Say someone funded a charity with a lot of money or appreciated assets. I would have the guy funding the charity give me the money to invest for him and then loose all his money in a phony ponzi scheme but return a large share of it in cash to him." I told him I didn't get it. Why would anyone want to loose money they donated to a charity? "Well,"he said, "if the markets are down and you need cash you already gave away it would be the perfect time to expose a non existent ponzi scheme where by you already received your kick back money years before. That is one reason Bernie would have loved doing business for non profit organizations they are designed to be looted." I had no idea. "So the victims are not necessarily victims at all?" "No ," he says," they could have given Bernie a million dollars and got back $800,000 the next week with Bernie's promise to grow the existing 200k into a fortune to fund the non profit into the future. And this way the victim actually saves on taxes making a huge million dollar donation and gets most of it back!" He really did think something like that was going on at the house of Madoff. What about the banks with the feeder funds? "Well, 'he says," they have the ultimate profit motif. It is money on deposit in their banks. The bank takes the eventual loss unless Bernie actually makes good, and the bankers get the kick backs instead of the depositors. Its not bad getting half a million in cash from Madoff while your depositors loose a million. Bernie floats to the surface like a bloated dead whale who ran a ponzi scheme and no one knows what was really going on. The federal investigators would never catch on. It all comes down to clever money laundering . But money laundering is not my department you have to go ask a different attorney who knows that business better than I do about how he could have done it." So I got on a flight to NYC and crossed over to the Jersey side to talk to one such attorney who ordinarily would have been charging $4000 an hour but was kind to me because I am an Associated Content Writer and he took me to lunch on condition of anonymity feeling charitable because I told him I am a starving artist. I told him the other lawyer's theory about the fake ponzi scheme and he said everyone in the biz already knows it had to be a multi-level scam but that he thought of it first and may have actually suggested it to Madoff but can't remember and it was confidential anyways, "Yeah if I had engineered it --it would have been a charitable trust kickback scheme. Better than a tax shelter. The money laundering would have been pretty simple--Pack and ship." Pack and ship? "Yeah, he says, thats where you fill a box full of cash and send it in the mail. Cash don't leave a trace. You can't send a check for a kick back with out an easy paper trail. Yeah you gotta be something like a bank to have that much cash lying around. Bernie was connected he might have even had a few friends in the right places--you know the government where they print the stuff. He was running billions of dollars not millions. It it was pack and ship he would have just gotten some of those flat rate up to 70 pound free mailing boxes from the US post office filled them with stacks of hundred dollar bills and sent them anonymously back to his tax cheat friends and victims. If I were doing it I would send an occasional box full of cash to a completely random person at a random address anonymously just to imagine their reaction. Bernie had plenty of money for anything.. Bernie probably just used legitimate trading in his non associated company to transfer the same as cash to the victims. Now once the scheme goes under the victims cry loud and try to get reimbursed double by government and the banks when they already got most of what they expected to get back for the most part." Wall street was more complex than I had ever imagined. He goes on, "You know I advised the US government on similar schemes to destroy small banana republic economies, It is much better to look like you are coming out a victim than a winner with the best of financial scams. From the stand point of my profession, even though its not legal what Bernie done, he done a very good job at it. I am sure glad I don't represent him." So it is possible that many Madoff ponzi scheme victims will never have to worry about an abusive government tax shelter "shake down" as he called it. He said he would not be surprised if Bill and Hillary Clinton did not receive a few anonymously addressed flat rate boxes full of cash from Madoff. "Where did all that Clinton money come from? Thin air?" That lawyer sent me to talk to a colleague who told me that Bernie "helped a lot of people most likely." The rest I am not at liberty to tell anyone. You don't want to know. That lawyer charges $8000 an hour with a one minute minimum limit ($133.00) I only took 2 minutes but it was worth it. I agreed not to write about what he said until I pay him the $266 I owe him. .