Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Story: Madoffs wooed banker in Charlotte

Tuesday wasn't the first time a family member visited North Carolina, according to a story in The (Syracuse, N.Y.) Post-Standard.

The newspaper quotes a man identified as a retired Wachovia senior vice president who said convicted financier Bernie Madoff's sons once met with the banker "at a steakhouse in Charlotte, N.C."

Earlier this week, Bernie Madoff reported to a federal prison in Butner, about 20 miles north of Raleigh.

Click here to read The Post-Standard story.

It says:

"Dalton Givens saw the warning signs.

Madoff's sons wined and dined Givens, then a senior vice president of Wachovia Securities, at a steakhouse in Charlotte, N.C., to try to persuade Wachovia to invest in Madoff's hedge fund.

Givens, now retired from the firm and living in Boonville, said he took a few sniffs and didn't like the aroma."

The story's focus was about how a New York labor union invested $180 million in pension money in Madoff's hedge fund.

As for the banker - he was suspicious: "Generally, when you have someone that controls everything about the fund, most (investment) firms wouldn't have anything to do with it."

- Doug Miller

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's a stretch. It would never have occurred to me to think of the disgraced Jim Black when reading this story.

Anonymous said...

Many people lost money to Madoff via Wachovia Securities and other financial management firms in Charlotte. The investment managers invested their money in feeder funds so nobody knew that the fund was actually Madoff's. Had breakfast with a friend the other day who lost $300k.

Lynne Stevenson said...

That's hilarious...someone from Wachovia actually told the Madoff family no...I trust the powers that be at Wachovia almost as much as I trusted Ken Lay and the Enron folks. Thank God, I didn't invest money with any of these people. I haven't banked with Wachovia since I had a teller scream at me in a full lobby of people that it was NOT THEIR FAULT that they could not tell me where my bank deposits had gone and that it was not their fault that I could not handle money! Up until that point, I had bank accounts for well over 30 years and never bounced any checks anywhere else. I closed that account that very afternoon and never returned. Same breed of dog, different dog show...