The Bernard Madoff aide who ran his investment advisory business had seven personal accounts with purported balances totaling almost $70 million when the firm collapsed, far more than she was paid, a jury was told, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Annette Bongiorno, hired by Madoff in 1968, when she was 19, earned a total of $3.91 million during the period from 1993 to 2008, the only years that documentation for her salary was available, Jason Wake, a Federal Bureau of Investigation forensic accountant, testified yesterday in Manhattan federal court in the trial of five ex-members of Madoff’s inner circle. The trial, which started in October, is the first stemming from Madoff’s $17 billion Ponzi scheme, which collapsed after his confession and arrest in December 2008. Bongiorno and four other former Madoff employees are accused of aiding the fraud for decades and getting rich in the process.
