Roger Ver Quotes

Now, a lot of people didn't know him at all - it went through feeder funds, so they wouldn't even have known anything about Bernie Madoff. But everybody finds a justification for their behavior, and obviously, Bernie had a half dozen justifications in his own mind.

I am profoundly concerned with the current treatment and status of Madoff fraud victims.

What transpired at Semgroup was no less than a $500 billion fraud on the people of the world.

You have a guy like Bernie Madoff literally steal $80 billion, you know, AIG steal hundreds of billions, Goldman Sachs. Crime has changed so much, and to really do a movie with, like, drug dealers or drug smugglers is kind of almost quaint at this point.

Bernie Madoff is probably more nuanced then I'm giving him credit for, but I just couldn't get under his skin.

Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, has seen a few financial schemes in his time. As the lead local prosecutor in the world's financial capital, he has battled frauds like the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which stole billions of dollars from investors worldwide.

Securities fraud generally and insider trading in particular should be eminently deterrable crimes.

Those who perpetrate fraud against our financial institutions will be met with the full force of law enforcement.

From 1983 to 2000, William Goren stole more than $30 million from investors on Long Island and in Queens. His favorite targets were widows and retired couples, like Helga and Simon Novack, Holocaust survivors who gave Mr. Goren their life savings.

Imagine being 30 years old, thinking you were a media titan, and now you are labeled a 'scam artist.'

We did not investigate Wall Street because we were troubled by large institutions making a lot of money; we took action to stop a blatant fraud that was ripping of small investors.

My experiences with … SEC officials proved to be a systemic disappointment and led me to conclude that the SEC securities lawyers, if only through their investigative ineptitude and financial illiteracy, colluded to maintain large frauds such as the one to which Madoff later confessed.

This was a massive Ponzi scheme and the biggest crime against the American economy in our lifetimes—in fact, ever…. You had various traders buying each other’s products to artificially keep the prices up so that the bubble didn’t collapse.

Surely I'm not the only person to ask the obvious question: How different, really, is Mr. Madoff's tale from the story of the investment industry as a whole?

The criminal law needs to be improved to meet new forms of crime, but to denounce financial devices which are useful and legitimate because use is made of them for fraud, is ridiculous and unworthy of the age in which we live.

I don't think anyone would argue with the notion that there have been serious abuses on Wall Street.

The company accountant is shy and retiring. He's shy a quarter of a million dollars. That's why he's retiring.

From coast to coast, the FBI and Securities and Exchange Commission have ensnared people not only at hedge funds, but at technology and pharmaceutical companies, consulting and law firms, government agencies, and even a major stock exchange.

In the movie 'Wall Street' I play Gordon Gekko, a greedy corporate executive who cheated to profit while innocent investors lost their savings. The movie was fiction, but the problem is real.

My family survived losing money to Bernie Madoff incredibly well compared to others.

The single most remarkable (and revealing) fact of the Obama presidency may very well be the lack of a single prosecution of Wall Street executives for the massive fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis.

The individual incentive not to commit crime on Wall Street now is almost zero.

Once I really got into securities fraud prosecutions, I came to realize how central they were to the maintenance of a free market and how, in many ways, they are far more important to the welfare of our society than many of the more sensational criminal cases that one hears about.

Ordinarily, the feds piggyback on the S.E.C. in complicated financial cases, but history proves that breath-holding on that score is a dangerous endeavor.

The savings and loan scandals grew in the dark basements of official government secrecy.