Good ‘ol Bernie Madoff. The former non-executive Chairman of the NASDAQ , stockbroker and financier who admitted to operating in a Ponzi scheme considered to be the largest financial fraud in US history, agreed to an interview with the Wall Street Journal while incarcerated.

His first act in the interview was to point fingers at other employees, and claim that the Ponzi scheme wasn’t really his fault. He said he felt “trapped” into the scheme by other people and always thought he would be able to get himself out of it.

People asked me all the time, how did I do it. And I refused to tell them, and they still invested. Things have to make sense to you. You should ask good questions.

He insisted that the banks knew about his fraud and were complicit in the scheme for years.

He could get away with it, he claims, simply because his reputation, and the reputation of his firm, was such that  auditors didn’t verify his firm’s assets at depository trusts.

“If they had checked me, I would have been found out,” he said.

No one in his immediate family talks to him anymore, not even his wife, he said. According to Madoff, this was the worst consequence of his conviction.

His son Andrew, as well as his wife and kids, also refuse to talk to him. His other son, Mark, committed suicide following the revelations of his father’s Ponzi scheme.

[Source : Wall Street Journal]