The Madoff Chronicles by Brian Ross

Author:Brian Ross
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Disney Book Group

CHAPTER

SEVEN

Eleanor

ELEANOR SQUILLARI ADORED BERNIE MADOFF in every way.

Even after the arrest, his secretary of twenty-five years was comfortable describing her feelings.

“I loved Bernie,” she said in tears. “I did. I did.”

Since the arrest and the revelation that he was a crook, however, she has come to feel a sense of betrayal and great anger. She is a woman scorned.

“I guess you could say he used me,” she said with a sigh. “I knew a certain side of Bernie that I cared about. I thought he was a great guy.”

Eleanor started working for Madoff in 1984, at the age of thirty-three. A tall, shapely, attractive brunette with an infectious laugh, she was a divorced mom raising a daughter and son.

“She was a looker,” recalled Little Rick, the office messenger who was sometimes dispatched by Madoff to pick up marijuana in Spanish Harlem.

Eleanor started as the main receptionist when Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities was still located at 110 Wall Street. Former employees say it was a place of fast-talking dealers and back-office workers who drank and partied hard, used lots of drugs, and liked to have sex on the boss’s sofa with whomever they could find for the night.

After a brief stint working with the traders, Eleanor took over as the secretary for Bernie and his brother, Peter. “They were funny, they were smart. I thought they were good-looking and that they had their act together.”

She also saw an intense sibling rivalry. “They fought all the time. Bernie would always set the rules and always had the last say. And Peter would follow.”

Eleanor took great pride in her work. She made sure to be one of the first people in every morning, leaving her house on Staten Island at 5:40 a.m. to catch the X30 express bus or the ferry across the harbor for the hour-long trip to the office in Manhattan.

Like generations of women from Staten Island who have crossed the harbor every morning before dawn to work as secretaries for the city’s powerful lawyers and financial titans, Eleanor was a power behind the throne at the Madoff firm. Her position as the boss’s secretary meant she was the gatekeeper for anyone who needed time with Bernie. She ran his schedule, fielded the phone calls he didn’t want to deal with, and kept his secrets—or at least the ones he chose to share with her. The “wild men” in the back office were careful about trying to hit on the boss’s secretary.

Madoff could be a difficult boss, whose needling, crude jokes, and insulting comments were unrelenting. He would come out of the men’s room with his zipper down, and when Eleanor rolled her eyes, “he would say ‘Oh, come on, you know you want it.’” He wouldn’t hesitate to tell her to “shut up” or suggest she was being paid too much.

In her early days there, she said, Bernie would feel free to pinch or pat the behinds of women in the office.

“In the beginning, I was much younger, and if he would be insulting, I would take it personally,” recalled Eleanor.

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