Ex-Madoff employee faces sentencing today
NEW YORK — The former operations manager for Ponzi scheme mastermind Bernard Madoff faces the possibility of a long prison term at his scheduled sentencing in federal court here Monday.
Daniel Bonventre, 67, will become the first of five former Madoff employees to be sentenced after all five were convicted in March on charges that they aided Madoff in his fraud scheme. Madoff's massive scam stole an estimated $20 billion from thousands of average investors, charities, celebrities and others worldwide.
The group, the only Madoff-linked defendants to stand trial, also consists of Annette Bongiorno, 66, the disgraced financier's longtime assistant; JoAnn Crupi, 53, who oversaw the investment firm's main bank account; and Jerome O'Hara, 51, and George Perez, 48, former Madoff computer programmers. The others are scheduled to be sentenced in the coming days.
Capping a months-long Manhattan federal court trial in March, a jury of eight women and three men rejected defense lawyers' claims of innocence and found the five guilty on all charges in a 31-count indictment.
The scheduled sentencings are set to begin nearly six years to the day of Madoff's Dec. 11, 2008, surrender and admission that the uncannily steady investment gains he reported for decades was the product of a scam in which he used some clients' funds to pay others. Madoff, now 76, is serving a 150-year prison term after he waived his right to trial and pleaded guilty in 2009.
Theoretically, the five could face the equivalent of life behind bars under federal sentencing guidelines. But those calculations are based on the fraud's record size and represent just one of several factors reviewed by U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain. She presided over the trial and is scheduled to impose sentences on the former co-workers.
The prosecution sentencing memo by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Matthew Schwartz, John Zach and Randall Jackson argued that that each of the five should receive "significantly greater" prison terms than the eight-year to 20-year sentences recommended by federal probation officials.