Five former employees of Bernard L. Madoff's former firm generated "millions of pages of lies" that allowed the convicted financier's Ponzi scheme to continue, prosecutors told a jury on the first day of a criminal trial in Manhattan federal court, the Wall Street Journal reported today. In some instances, the defendants used special types of paper, obsessed over type fonts and had extensive conversations about how an asterisk should look in order to make bogus forms appear legitimate, Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Schwartz said during his 90-minute opening statement. All the lies had one purpose, according to Schwartz: to perpetuate a massive fraud that made the defendants themselves rich. The trial, expected to last five months, could represent prosecutors' last and best chance to undermine Madoff's insistence that he carried out the fraud essentially alone. It also is the first time prosecutors provided details of the inner workings of the Ponzi scheme to a jury.
