NEW YORK — The former chief financial officer for Bernard Madoff pleaded guilty Tuesday to conspiracy, admitting to helping Madoff carry out a massive fraud that cost thousands of people billions of dollars by lying to investors and testifying falsely when it seemed the fraud might be discovered.
“I was loyal to him. I ended up being loyal to a terrible, terrible fault,” Frank DiPascali said as he pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Manhattan to charges including securities fraud, falsifying records and international money laundering.
The plea to charges that carry a potential penalty of up to 125 years in prison came with a cooperation deal that could earn him leniency.
He said he began working for Madoff in 1975, just after he finished high school, and had joined Madoff in his fraud by the 1980s or early 1990s, when he knew that he and Madoff were promising investors that unmade transactions were in fact being made.
DiPascali says the transactions were “all fake. It was wrong, and I knew it was wrong at the time.” The Associated Press
