A former trader at Bernard Madoff’s firm told a jury that, as a bonus, the con man let him ascribe backdated trades to his personal investment account, as long as they didn’t look “ridiculous,” Bloomberg News reported yesterday. David Kugel testified yesterday in Manhattan federal court at the trial of five former Madoff employees that he also provided fake trading data for customer accounts to defendants Annette Bongiorno and Joann Crupi, who ran the investment business at the center of Madoff’s $17 billion Ponzi scheme. Kugel, who pleaded guilty to fraud in November 2011, was hired out of Pace University by Madoff in 1970. On trial alongside Bongiorno and Crupi are Daniel Bonventre — who oversaw the broker-dealer and proprietary trading operations where Kugel worked — and computer programmers George Perez and Jerome O’Hara, who allegedly automated the creation of millions of fake documents. All five have pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiring to trick customers and regulators for years.
