Come on, Joe Cotchett! You had 270 minutes with the financial Osama Bin Laden and you can't even give us a hint about what you learned about his lieutenants? Following the San Francisco attorney's jailhouse heart-to-heartstone with Madoff, Cotchett talked to ABC News, and maybe they're holding back the good stuff for tonight's newscast, but so far, this article in the San Francisco Chronicle provides the most insight into what Cotchett learned.
And that is (ironic drumroll please): that Bernie cares for his wife, is estranged from his sons, and fooled investors and regulators with "smoke and mirrors." No kidding.
To be fair, Cotchett's primary responsibility is not to the morbidly curious so much as to his Madoff investor clients, and the attorney is almost surely saving his disclosures about Madoff associates for a future legal filing.
Here's another article, courtesy the Wall Street Journal, which talked to Cotchett about the interview:
Madoff told him, in essence, that "you didn't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what was going on. What happened here was when you're getting the kinds of returns [Madoff reported to clients], you might have a tendency to look the other way rather than asking questions." Cotchett added that "it's clear from the details that he gave us that there were many people here who were negligent and not doing due diligence."Ha! Let's blame the victim. And when you run out of victims, blame the regulators. At what point is it OK to start blaming the chorus of sirens who led investors to the shipwreck?
Cotchett, it should be noted, has a streak for keeping goodies away from the media, as our sister paper in San Francisco learned when it tried to peek into his divorce file.
