Bernie Madoff’s Secretary, Eleanor Squillari, Spills His Secrets

From Vanity Fair On Line

Bernie Madoff was a sexist, egomaniacal, short-tempered control freak—yet everybody loved him. That is according to his secretary of more than 20 years, Eleanor Squillari, who co-authored a 9,000-word article in the June issue of Vanity Fair .        

After spending two months helping the F.B.I. gather evidence against her former boss, Squillari, a 59-year-old mother of two from Staten Island, returned a call from V.F’s     Mark Seal, who had contacted her in connection with the eye-opening Madoff story he wrote in the magazine’s April issue. Seal and Squillari ended up collaborating on a first-person account of Squillari’s time with Madoff, whom she knew as well as anyone outside his family.

The article, entitled “Hello, Madoff!,” is accompanied by more than a dozen intimate photos of Madoff and his family from as far back as the 1970s. Among the topics that Seal and Squillari cover are:

Bernie’s views on stealing:

• Squillari recalls an unusually prescient conversation she had with Madoff years earlier, after a client’s secretary had been arrested for embezzlement. “You know, [he] has to take some responsibility for this,” Madoff told Squillari. “He should have been keeping an eye on his personal finances. That’s why I’ve always had Ruth watching the books. Nothing gets by Ruth.” Squillari says she was surprised when he added: “Well, you know what happens is, it starts out with you taking a little bit, maybe a few hundred, a few thousand. You get comfortable with that, and before you know it, it snowballs into something big.”

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