The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government, created in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The primary purpose of the SEC is to enforce the law against market manipulation.
RELX plc is a British multinational information and analytics company headquartered in London, England. Its businesses provide scientific, technical and medical information and analytics; legal information and analytics; decision-making tools; and organise exhibitions. It operates in 40 countries and serves customers in over 180 nations. It was previously known as Reed Elsevier, and came into being in 1993 as a result of the merger of Reed International, a British trade book and magazine publisher, and Elsevier, a Netherlands-based scientific publisher.
LexisNexis is a part of the RELX corporation that sells data analytics products and various databases that are accessed through online portals, including portals for computer-assisted legal research (CALR), newspaper search, and consumer information. During the 1970s, LexisNexis began to make legal and journalistic documents more accessible electronically. As of 2006, the company had the world's largest electronic database for legal and public-records–related information.
Elizabeth Johnson Kostova is an American author best known for her debut novel The Historian.
The Historian is the 2005 debut novel of American author Elizabeth Kostova. The plot blends the history and folklore of Vlad Țepeș and his fictional equivalent Count Dracula. Kostova's father told her stories about Dracula when she was a child, and later in life she was inspired to turn the experience into a novel. She worked on the book for ten years and then sold it within a few months to Little, Brown and Company, which bought it for US$2 million.
Bernard Lawrence Madoff was an American fraudster and financier who was the admitted mastermind of the largest known Ponzi scheme in history, worth an estimated $65 billion. He was at one time chairman of the Nasdaq stock exchange. Madoff's firm had two basic units: a stock brokerage and an asset management business; the Ponzi scheme was centered in the asset management business.
Harry M. Markopolos is an American former securities industry executive and a forensic accounting and financial fraud investigator.
René-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet was a French aristocrat, money manager, and businessman. He was one of the founders of Access International Advisors, a company caught and subsumed in the Madoff investment scandal in 2008. He committed suicide after losing an estimated $1.4 billion in Madoff's scheme.
David G. Friehling is an American accountant who was arrested and charged in March 2009 for his role in the Madoff investment scandal. He subsequently pleaded guilty to rubber-stamping Bernard Madoff's filings with regulators rather than fully reviewing them. His role in covering up Madoff's massive Ponzi scheme makes it the largest accounting fraud in history.
Andrew Neill Vollmer is an American lawyer. He retired as partner in the securities department at law firm WilmerHale. Prior to April 2009, he had been Deputy General Counsel for the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and acting General Counsel. He succeeded Meyer Eisenberg as Deputy General Counsel, who retired from the Commission in early January 2006 and former General Counsel Brian Cartwright who left the Commission for the private sector in January 2009.
Fairfield Greenwich Group is an investment firm founded in 1983 in New York City. The firm had among the largest exposures to the Bernard Madoff fraud.
The Madoff investment scandal was a major case of stock and securities fraud discovered in late 2008. In December of that year, Bernie Madoff, the former Nasdaq chairman and founder of the Wall Street firm Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, admitted that the wealth management arm of his business was an elaborate multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme.
Genevievette Walker-Lightfoot is a former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) attorney. She worked on the Bernard Madoff investigation in 2004, as the Lead Investigator for the SEC on the case. She discovered key elements of the Madoff Ponzi scheme and reported them to her superiors. She was moved off the case prior to being able to complete the investigation.
Chasing Madoff is a 2010 documentary film written and directed by Jeff Prosserman. The film is based on the book by Harry Markopolos. It was first released at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam on 19 November 2010. It was first shown in North America on 26 August 2011.
Susanna Mary Clarke is an English author known for her debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), a Hugo Award-winning alternative history. Clarke began Jonathan Strange in 1993 and worked on it during her spare time. For the next decade, she published short stories from the Strange universe, but it was not until 2003 that Bloomsbury bought her manuscript and began work on its publication. The novel became a best-seller.
Access International Advisors and Marketers, a Securities and Exchange Commission-registered investment advisor and a hedge fund of funds, was a research analyst investment agency that specialized in managing hedged and structured investment portfolios that involve commercial physical and biological research. It was a feeder fund into the securities firm of Bernie Madoff, as part of the Madoff investment scandal.
Shana Diane Madoff, sometimes referred to as Shana Madoff Skoller Swanson, is an American former attorney who is now a yoga teacher.
Eric J. Swanson is an American lawyer who worked at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and dated and eventually married the niece of Bernard Madoff while the SEC was investigating Madoff's investment firm for what was eventually revealed to be a massive Ponzi scheme. Swanson is currently the Senior Vice President, General Counsel, and Secretary of BATS Global Markets, the third-largest stock exchange in the United States.
The Wizard of Lies is a 2017 American television biopic film directed by Barry Levinson and written by Sam Levinson, Sam Baum, and John Burnham Schwartz, based on the 2011 non-fiction book of the same name by Diana B. Henriques. The film stars Robert De Niro as businessman and fraudster Bernie Madoff, Michelle Pfeiffer as his wife Ruth Madoff, and Alessandro Nivola as their older son Mark Madoff. It aired on HBO on May 20, 2017. This is the fourth film featuring De Niro and Pfeiffer, following Stardust (2007), New Year's Eve (2011) and The Family (2013), as well as their first collaboration for television.
Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street is a 2023 American true crime documentary series directed by Joe Berlinger and based in part on the 2021 book Madoff Talks by Jim Campbell. The four-part series was produced by RadicalMedia in association with Third Eye Motion Picture Company for the streaming service Netflix and released in its entirety on January 4, 2023. It details how Bernie Madoff rose to power and, using former employees, investigators, journalists, victims, whistleblowers, and Madoff video depositions, unpacks the world's biggest Ponzi scheme while also laying blame on the many who saw an abundance of red flags but decided to shrug them off and look the other way.
