Monica and Walter M. Noel, whose firm lost $7.5 billion.
Why Is It That The New York Times Company Can Get A Reporter Up To Greenwich To File An In Depth Story On Madoff Middleman Walter Noel, But Hearst Newspapers Can't Get A Greenwich Citizen Or Greenwich Time Reporter To Cover The Story?
As Usual, Greenwich Bloggers And Out Of Town Newspapers Are The Only Ones Adequately Cover Major Greenwich News Stories With National Implications.
Greenwich Time Editor Jim Zorba Is Once Again A Sleep At The Switch As Bloggers And Out Of Town Newspapers Beat Out The Greenwich Time Once Again.
FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE:
As a go-between who shepherded clients and their money to
Bernard L. Madoff, Walter M. Noel became so prosperous that he was only too happy to show off his good fortune to the world.
In 2002, Vanity Fair dispatched the photographer Bruce Weber to shoot a lavish spread of Mr. Noel’s wife and their five grown daughters at his home in Connecticut (“Golden in Greenwich,” read the headline). That was followed, in 2005, by a Town and Country story on the Noel family’s tropical retreat in Mustique.
These houses — joining Mr. Noel’s addresses in Palm Beach and Southampton and on Park Avenue — were visible evidence of his investment empire, the Fairfield Greenwich Group, which had $14.1 billion in February.
Mr. Noel’s firm, including four sons-in-law as partners, now has the distinction of being the biggest known loser in the Madoff scandal, to the tune of $7.5 billion.....
.....The Fairfield Greenwich Group charged clients an annual fee of 1 percent of assets invested for providing access to exclusive hedge funds and performing due diligence on them, in addition to a fee of 20 percent on investment gains each year, according to people close to the fund’s operations. At that rate, an investment of $7 billion paid Mr. Noel’s company $70 million annually, and then $140 million more in a year in which Mr. Madoff reported a 10 percent gain (he steadily reported returns of 10 to 12 percent)......
....Mr. Noel’s largest fund, the $7.3 billion Fairfield Sentry fund, invested exclusively with Mr. Madoff. Mr. Noel has not disclosed how much of that was his own or belonged to family members and how much was his investors’. One of his daughters said, through a spokeswoman at Rubenstein Public Relations, that “a very substantial part of each family member’s personal assets was invested with Bernard Madoff alongside those of our investors.”.....
Fairfield Greenwich is based on East 52nd Street, though Mr. Noel worked frequently from Fairfield with his partners, Jeffrey Tucker, formerly of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Andres Piedrahita. The 78-year-old Mr. Noel had a master’s degree in economics and a law degree — both from
Harvard — and had worked for decades in banking before he founded
Fairfield Greenwich, which established itself primarily as a marketing entity.
“As it grew beyond, you know, an informal, personal concern where Walter and a couple of people were investing money for his friends, they developed as a marketing force to put Madoff and investors together,” said George L. Ball, a former executive at E. F. Hutton and Prudential-Bache Securities who became friends with the Noels decades ago when both lived in Greenwich.
Mr. Noel met Mr. Madoff in the early 1980s and the businesses of both men grew symbiotically. Mr. Noel was as good a salesman as Mr. Madoff could have wished for. Mr. Noel is routinely described as affable, assured, graceful and nonaggressive. ....
EVERYONE LOVED THE HOT NOEL BABES SPREAD OUT ON
FAMILY X-MAS CARDS
......They built a modestly prosperous life in Greenwich, and were perhaps best known among associates for their Christmas cards— “the people with five stunning girls,” in the words of a family friend.
“As we know, Walter’s success came after several thin years,” wrote John J. McCloy, a banker from Greenwich who described himself and his wife, Laura, as the Noels’ “best friends for more than 30 years,” in May in a letter recommending the Noels to membership in a private club.
In an interview, Mr. McCloy declined to name the club and said that he and his family had not invested with Mr. Madof......
THE HOT NOEL BABES HELP SPREAD THE FAMILY BUSINESS AROUND THE WORLD
.....The Noel sisters went to prestigious colleges in the United States — Harvard, Yale, Brown, and two at Georgetown — but their spouses are largely from abroad, which helped the company extend its global reach.
Mr. Piedrahita, who is married to Corina Noel, grew up in Bogotá, Colombia, went to
Boston University, and made a career in the marketing of hedge fund products before becoming a partner in the firm in 1997. Lisina Noel’s husband, Yanko Della Schiava, worked for two textile firms in Italy and “markets F.G.G.’s offshore funds throughout Southern Europe from his base in F.G.G.’s Lugano representative office,” according to the company’s Web site. Alix Noel’s husband, Philip Jamchid Toub, is from Lausanne, Switzerland, and is also involved in marketing the firm’s offshore funds in New York. Marisa Noel’s husband, Matthew Brown, went to St. Mary’s College in San Francisco and also has a marketing position at the firm.
A fifth Noel daughter, Ariane, lives in London and is married to Marco Sodi, an Italian financier.
David Patrick Columbia, the editor of NewYorkSocialDiary .com, said they had burst on the New York-Southampton social scene in the last few years. “They bought a
Stanford White house near Lake Agawam a couple of years back,” he said. The house has been valued at $9.4 million.
WALTER NOEL'S FUND RESULTS WERE "STATISTICALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO REPLICATE" AND REMINDED ONE OF THAT OTHER PONZI SCHEME KNOWN AS THE BAYOU FUND
People in the industry continue to question Fairfield’s due diligence. Michael Markov, a hedge fund consultant, said that he was hired by a fund two years ago to look into Fairfield Sentry’s returns and found that it was “statistically impossible to replicate them,” he said.
Mr. Markov said that he found only one hedge fund whose returns correlated to Mr. Madoff’s. That was the Bayou fund, which was prosecuted by the government for fraud in 2006.
You Might Remember The Bayou Fund Was.....The Bayou Hedge Fund Group was a group of companies and
hedge funds founded by
Samuel Israel III in 1996. Approximately $450m was raised by the group from investors. Its investors were defrauded from the start with funds being misappropriated for personal use. After poor returns in 1998 the investors were lied to about the fund's returns and a fake accounting firm was set up to provide misleading audited results.
In 2005, Israel and CFO Daniel Marino pleaded guilty to multiple charges including conspiracy and fraud. Marino was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Israel was sentenced to 20 years prison and ordered to forfeit $300 million. At his sentencing Israel said "I lied to you and I cheated you and I cannot put into words how sorry I am
In 1996, investors gave the fund US$300 million. Investors were promised that the fund would grow to about US$7.1 billion in ten years. In 1998-9 trading losses accumulated quickly. The company started a dummy corporation and hired it to audit themselves.
According to federal prosecutors, Bayou had lied about its operations since the beginning, by “overstated gains, understated losses, and reported gains where there were losses.” Court documents show that Bayou never made any money. In mid-2004, Bayou sent a letter to investors claiming that its assets valued in excess of US$450 million.
In 2004, Samuel Israel III and Daniel Marino, the CEO and CFO, respectively, stopped trading fully and spent all resources on covering losses. Over the course of six days in July 2004, Bayou withdrew about $161 million from five bank accounts. They were eventually caught wiring US$100 million overseas.
On 14 April 2008, Israel was sentenced to 20 years in prison and ordered to forfeit $300 million after pleading guilty to defrauding investors in his now-bankrupt firm. On 10 June 2008, it was reported by the press that Israel may have committed suicide after a car registered to Israel was found abandoned on a bridge that spans one of the deepest stretches of the Hudson River in New York. It was the same day that Israel was supposed to begin serving his 20-year prison sentence.
His vehicle was found abandoned on the Bear Mountain Bridge over the Hudson River in New York with the words "
Suicide is Painless" written in the dust on his hood. Israel turned himself into Southwick, Mass., police on Wednesday July 2, 2008.
=========================================================
