The Madoff Chronicles: Inside the Secret World of Bernie and Ruth by Brian Ross

Author:Brian Ross [Ross, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Swindlers and Swindling, Business, Ponzi Schemes, Capitalists and Financiers, Criminals & Outlaws, Commercial Crimes, Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 140131029X
Google: y3Kmzeu7CoEC
Amazon: B003BVK2LC
Publisher: Hyperion
Published: 2009-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Men Who Should Have Known

WALTER NOEL APPEARED TO HAVE IT ALL. AS A RESULT, HE was despised by many in his hometown of Greenwich, Connecticut.

Status and wealth are closely tracked in this elite New York suburb. His envious neighbors found the courtly seventy-nine-year-old “affable enough,” with his gentle Tennessee accent and manners. But given his seemingly ordinary grasp of finances and the market, they could not understand how he had been able to achieve a level of wealth that was remarkable even by Greenwich standards. “I had lunch with him several times and he just wasn’t that smart,” said one prominent hedge fund owner whose own earnings and track record could not match Noel’s. What the hedge fund owner did not know was that Noel had been able to achieve record investment returns and become very rich because he was one of Bernie Madoff’s “feeders.” Since 1989, he had made hundreds of millions of dollars in huge commissions on the money that, for the most part, he simply sent from his clients to Madoff’s secretive operation.

The “mechanics” who had produced the phony statements and created the fictitious trades on the seventeenth floor of Madoff’s New York offices were an essential ingredient of the scheme, but their work wouldn’t have amounted to much without the “money men” like Noel. These were the men who trolled the country clubs and the suburbs and the exclusive resorts, recruiting wealthy clients for Madoff. There were dozens of them, but none more important than Noel and his firm, Fairfield Greenwich, whose clients comprised the single biggest account in Madoff’s empire. When Madoff was arrested, Noel’s clients thought they had $7.2 billion invested with Madoff. In fact, they had nothing.

Noel’s lifestyle and social prominence had grown in tandem with Madoff’s scam. He and his Brazilian-born wife, Monica, had a huge mansion on Greenwich’s prestigious Round Hill Road. They owned an oceanfront estate on Long Island, in Southampton. For those nights when the black-tie charity balls went too late, there was a New York apartment on Park Avenue. The crown jewel in the Noel empire, however, was a hilltop villa on the privately owned Caribbean island of Mustique.

According to a profile of the Noels that appeared in Town & Country, their villa had its own name, Yemanjá, the Brazilian goddess of the sea. His Round Hill neighbors in Greenwich who thought they were so much smarter had a serious case of envy as they flipped through the glossy pages of the magazine and read about the great Walter Noel and his island retreat.

His wife “shopped uptown Manhattan” for fabrics and “downtown at an African importer” for wooden stools and benches. Monica was “indefatigable, she scoped out the furniture market in High Point, North Carolina, and the designer showrooms in Dania, Florida, for bamboo side tables, dining chairs, and ceramics.” Top name architects, designers, and landscapers were flown in as Monica created “just the insouciant, global primitive style she was after.” Tommy Hilfiger said the Noels had “the best view on the island.

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