Related: Madoff, Mossad and the AmeriKan MSM
Who’s behind Madoff?
Instead we get this as some sort of investigative journalism? Stop nibbling on the edges, MSM!
"Lawyers' financial duties debated; Madoff case raises questions regarding fiduciary responsibility" by Beth Healy, Globe Staff | March 26, 2009
On Bernard L. Madoff's customer list, there's a set of middlemen that's intimately familiar with the laws around financial advice: attorneys.
The Boston names are familiar, and often high profile - Mintz, Levin; Bingham McCutchen; Hemenway & Barnes. What they share in common is having provided some level of investment-related services to their clients, either through a dedicated arm of their business or as a core part of their practice. The question is, did they have an obligation to warn clients away from the New York investment manager who turned out to be running a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme?
The answer depends quite specifically on what jobs these lawyers told clients they would do for them. And the answer may be particularly complicated in Boston, where, historically, many lawyers have carved out a niche as trustees and financial advisers.
Kenneth P. Brier, a Boston lawyer who specializes in trusts and estates, said a lawyer's role can span from casual advice to that of trustee, the "highest level of duty" to a client, where "you're typically liable for the investments in some manner."
Even a lawyer who delegates the actual selection of client investments to a financial adviser may have some liability, Brier said. "It doesn't mean you're totally off the hook. You're still responsible for prudence and care in selecting an agent."
Gordon "Bud" Ehrlich of Bingham McCutchen is one lawyer whose name appears on the Madoff list. A longtime tax and estate-planning attorney, he had at least two clients with Madoff accounts, according to the Madoff customer list made public in a February court filing. A third client is listed with the contact Elizabeth Bertolozzi, who was a senior executive of Bingham Legg Advisors, a money manager for wealthy families that Bingham sold in July 2007.
Ehrlich declined to be interviewed for this story. A spokesman for Bingham, Hank Shafran, said the firm could not comment on whether Ehrlich had a fiduciary duty to his clients. He said only that Ehrlich was "not an investment adviser."
A spokeswoman for Mintz, Levin said the firm would not comment on whether it had a duty to its clients in the Madoff matter - the Goldberg family and their foundation, called the Sidney R. Rabb Charitable Trust. Cary P. Geller, a financial adviser with Mintz, Levin's investment group, Mintz Levin Financial Advisors, declined to comment through the spokeswoman.
The Goldberg family, which made its fortune on the Stop & Shop supermarkets, has been a longtime supporter of the Boston Latin School, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Combined Jewish Philanthropies, and other causes. The Goldbergs did not respond to requests for an interview. At Hemenway & Barnes, which also is listed as having advised the Goldberg family, attorney Arthur B. Page did not respond to requests for an interview....
Attorneys are likely to be safer than other intermediaries as investors look for people to sue to recoup their Madoff losses, mainly because lawyers aren't eager to sue other lawyers. Lawyers, for the most part, police themselves in their investment advisory capacity....
I always knew there was something a little too clubby about the "law."
But Secretary of State William F. Galvin has heard from investors who feel that their lawyers may have given them bad advice about Madoff....
Any lawyers who are sued are likely to mount an "SEC defense," attorneys said. Brier, the estate lawyer, said the Securities and Exchange Commission "was supposed to know these things. When invited to go examine Madoff, they couldn't find anything. All kinds of apparently prudent people were investing with Madoff."
That would not seem to be a particularly high standard, given the very public failure of the SEC to pursue a whistle-blower's warnings about Madoff over a decade, or to detect Madoff's fraud during examinations. Still, both Brier and Muldoon said they expect to see defendants rely on that defense....
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Another article that is mostly fluff. Drops a few names but tells you nothing, just like all the Globe stories regarding this Jewish mobster who was working for Mossad.
