title: Oldham Athletic A.F.C.

text: Latics originally started out playing in red and white hooped shirts with blue shorts, bearing strong similarities to the Oldham Rugby League Club colours. The red stripes were eventually replaced with blue, before this was in turn replaced by a white shirt with the blue stripe down the middle; this shirt was rumoured to have been influenced by the Ajax shirt of the times. In the mid-1960s, under the ownership of Ken Bates, the strip was changed to tangerine shirts with blue shorts. In the mid-1970s the club adopted an all blue shirt, and these colours have been worn ever since, with the exception of the red and blue hooped shirt that was used the late 1990s. This shirt proved unpopular among supporters and caused kit clashing problems, resulting in opposition teams occasionally having to wear Oldham's away kit. The club brought back the colours from the 1960s as an away kit for the 2007–08 season and this proved to be popular amongst the supporters. Home and away shirts currently bear the slogan "keep the faith" as a result of the financial turmoil the club faced in 2004. On 27 April, it was announced on a new website set up by the club (wearelatics.co.uk) that there was to be a new crest for the club. This new badge was shown on the new away kit for the 2011–12 season, and was introduced to the home kit for the following season. The badge contains the traditional blue and white colours, however, there is no longer any red visible; there is still an image of an owl, yet it remains on top of a football.


title: Oldham Athletic A.F.C.

text: After playing at what was originally called Athletic Ground, Boundary Park was opened for Oldham's first football club—Oldham County F.C. In 1899, after County had folded, Pine Villa moved into the ground and renamed the club and stadium. The stadium is located on the Oldham side of the conjunction of Oldham, Chadderton and Royton, and has a current capacity of 13,512. Before the demolition of the north stand in 2008, the stadium had a capacity of 13,624. The new north stand has recently opened with many new facilities available. This was done in a bid to gain extra revenue in a troubled cash stricken period for the club since Moore's departure.


title: Oldham Athletic A.F.C.

text: The record attendance is 47,671 during an FA Cup tie between Oldham and Sheffield Wednesday in 1930 – the ground capacity at the time was nearly 50,000.


title: Oldham Athletic A.F.C.

text: In February 2006, the club unveiled plans for the reconstruction of the stadium. After initially being rejected by Oldham Council, the decision was overturned with permission for the entire ground to be redeveloped. The ground was expected to seat at least 16,000 and cost approximately £80 million. On 5 September 2008, Simon Blitz announced on World Soccer Daily podcast that due to the economic problems in England, the development of the stadium was placed on hold temporarily.


title: Oldham Athletic A.F.C.

text: On 22 July 2009, the club and Oldham Council unveiled plans for an entirely new, £20 million stadium to be located in Failsworth. The club made an agreement with BAE Systems to purchase a piece of land, on which the club plans to build an initial 12,000-capacity arena along with other leisure and corporate facilities. Oldham Council initially backed the plans for the new stadium after council chiefs voted in favour of pushing forward with a land deal, but later offered the club £5.7 million to help with the redevelopment of Boundary Park, which would involve building a new North Stand on the site of the former Broadway Stand.


title: Oldham Athletic A.F.C.

text: Initial preparatory work began on the site for the new North Stand at Boundary Park in mid-May 2013. The stand has a capacity of 2,671 for spectators and contains various other non-matchday facilities such as a health and fitness suite and supporters bar. The new North Stand partially opened against Sheffield United on 17 October 2015, with maximum capacity operation and corporate facilities in use on 26 December 2015 vs. Doncaster Rovers.


title: Oldham Athletic A.F.C.

text: Notable Oldham Athletic fans include comedy duo Cannon and Ball, professor and former musician Brian Cox, ex-Manchester United footballer Paul Scholes, television presenter Phillip Schofield, ex-Leeds Rhinos and England rugby captain Kevin Sinfield, The Courteeners rhythm guitarist Danny Moores, glamour model Michelle Marsh, Hollyoaks actor Alex Carter and comedian Eric Sykes.


title: Oldham Athletic A.F.C.

text: Boundary Park is less than from the nearby Football League stadiums of Rochdale, Manchester City, Salford City and Manchester United, with the stadiums of Stockport County, Huddersfield Town, Burnley, Bolton Wanderers, Accrington Stanley and Blackburn Rovers all within a 20-mile (32 km) radius.


title: Oldham Athletic A.F.C.

text: Traditional local rivals include Bolton Wanderers, Stockport County, Rochdale, Bury and Blackburn Rovers, although none of these clubs are now a regular opponent. Since the 1990s it could be considered that the Roses derby with Yorkshire neighbours Huddersfield Town has been the club's fiercest and most regular rivalry.


title: Oldham Athletic A.F.C.

text: Dislike for Manchester United and Manchester City is also common and often eclipses more traditional rivalries amongst Oldham supporters. This is largely fuelled by Oldham's proximity to Manchester, with a sizeable number of people in the borough choosing to support one of the Manchester clubs rather than their local club. The dislike for Manchester United is also partly fuelled by the FA Cup Semi-Final meetings in 1990 and 1994, both of which Oldham lost after replays.


title: Oldham Athletic A.F.C.

text: A survey conducted in August 2019 by GiveMeSport.com revealed that Latics fans consider Rochdale to be the club's main rival with 82% of votes, followed by Bolton Wanderers (74%), Huddersfield Town (67%), Blackburn Rovers (58%) and Manchester United (52%).


title: Oldham Athletic A.F.C.

text: Conversely, Oldham Athletic have a long-standing supporters friendship with Eintracht Frankfurt. A small section of Frankfurt's support often makes the journey to Oldham Athletic games at Boundary Park.


title: Oldham Athletic A.F.C.

text: In the history of the club, only three managers have won a league title: George Hardwick (Division Three North, 1953), Jimmy Frizzell (Division Three, 1974) and Joe Royle (Division Two, 1991). Frizzell also won promotion from Division Four in 1971 (3rd place), as did Jack Rowley from the runners-up spot in 1963.


title: Oldham Athletic A.F.C.

text: However, arguably the most successful manager in the club's history is David Ashworth. Appointed in 1906, he guided them to the Lancashire Combination Championship and promotion to the Football League in his first season. In 1910, after just three seasons in Division 2, they finished in second place and won promotion to the top flight of English football. For the next four years Ashworth maintained the club's smooth progress. They finished season 1913–14 in fourth place, only for Ashworth to move to Stockport County, leaving his successor Herbert Bamlett to take the team to its best-ever league placing the season after, when they finished runners-up to Everton, missing out on the League Championship by just one point.


title: Oldham Athletic A.F.C.

text: Meanwhile, at the end of World War 1, Ashworth emerged as manager of Liverpool, guiding them to the League Championship in 1921–22, after they had finished fourth in his previous two seasons. Although he then took what seemed to many to be a strange decision, moving back to Oldham in a brave but failed attempt to save them from relegation in 1923, he remains the only Oldham Athletic manager ever to have won the Football League Championship with any club.


title: Naked Lunch

text: Naked Lunch (sometimes The Naked Lunch) is a 1959 novel by American writer William S. Burroughs. The book is structured as a series of loosely connected vignettes, intended by Burroughs to be read in any order. The reader follows the narration of junkie William Lee, who takes on various aliases, from the U.S. to Mexico, eventually to Tangier and the dreamlike Interzone.


title: Naked Lunch

text: The vignettes (which Burroughs called "routines") are drawn from Burroughs' own experiences in these places and his addiction to drugs: heroin, morphine and, while in Tangier, majoun (a strong hashish confection), as well as a German opioid with the brand name Eukodol (oxycodone), of which he wrote frequently.


title: Naked Lunch

text: The novel was included in "Time"'s "100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005". In 1991, David Cronenberg directed a film of the same name based on the novel and other Burroughs writings.


title: Naked Lunch

text: The book was originally published with the title "The Naked Lunch" in Paris in July 1959 by Olympia Press. Because of US obscenity laws, a complete American edition (by Grove Press) did not follow until 1962. It was titled "Naked Lunch" and was substantially different from the Olympia Press edition because it was based on an earlier 1958 manuscript in Allen Ginsberg's possession. The definite article "the" in the title was never intended by the author, but added by the editors of the Olympia Press 1959 edition. Nonetheless "The Naked Lunch" remained the title used for the 1968 and 1974 Corgi Books editions, and the novel is often known by the alternative name, especially in the UK where these editions circulated.


title: Naked Lunch

text: Burroughs wrote in his introduction that Jack Kerouac suggested the title. "The title means exactly what the words say: "naked" lunch, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork."


title: Naked Lunch

text: In a June 1960 letter to Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac wrote that he was pleased that Burroughs had credited him with the title, writing that Ginsberg misread "Naked Lust" from the manuscript, and only he noticed. Kerouac did not specify which manuscript, and critics could only speculate until 2003 when Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris established that, in his Lower East Side apartment in fall 1953, Ginsberg had been reading aloud to Kerouac from the manuscript of "Queer", which Burroughs had just brought with him from Mexico City. For the next five years, Burroughs used the title to refer to a three-part work made up of "Junk", "Queer" and "Yage", corresponding to his first three manuscripts, before it came to describe the book later published as "Naked Lunch", which was based largely on his 1957 "Interzone" manuscript.


title: Naked Lunch

text: Upon publication, Grove Press added to the book supplementary material regarding the censorship battle as well as an article written by Burroughs on the topic of drug addiction. In 2001, a "restored text" edition of "Naked Lunch" was published with some new and previously suppressed material added.


title: Naked Lunch

text: "Naked Lunch" is a non-linear narrative without a clear plot. The following is a summary of some of the events in the book that could be considered the most relevant.


title: Naked Lunch

text: The book begins with the adventures of William Lee (also known as "Lee the Agent"), who is Burroughs' alter ego in the novel. His journey starts in the U.S. where he is fleeing the police in search of his next fix. There are short chapters describing the different characters he travels with and meets along the way.


title: Naked Lunch

text: Eventually he gets to Mexico where he is assigned to Dr. Benway; for what, he is not told. Benway appears and he tells about his previous doings in Annexia as a "Total Demoralizator." The story then moves to a state called Freeland, a form of limbo, where we learn of Islam Inc. Here, some new characters are introduced, such as Clem, Carl, and Joselito.


title: Naked Lunch

text: A short section then jumps in space and time to a marketplace. The Black Meat is sold here and compared to "junk", i.e. heroin. The action then moves back to the hospital where Benway is fully revealed as a manipulative sadist.


title: Naked Lunch

text: Time and space again shift the narrative to a location known as Interzone. Hassan, one of the notable characters of the book and "a notorious liquefactionist", is throwing a violent orgy. AJ crashes the party and wreaks havoc, decapitating people and imitating a pirate. Hassan is enraged and tells AJ never to return, calling him a "factualist bitch," a term which is enlarged much later when the apparently "clashing" political factions within Interzone are described. These include the Liquefactionists, the Senders, the Factualists, and the Divisionists (who occupy "a midway position"). A short descriptive section tells of Interzone University, where a professor and his students are ridiculed; the book moves on to an orgy that AJ throws.


title: Naked Lunch

text: The book then shifts back to the market place and a description of the totalitarian government of Annexia. Characters including the County Clerk, Benway, Dr. Berger, Clem and Jody are sketched through heavy dialogue and their own sub-stories.


title: Naked Lunch

text: After the description of the four parties of Interzone, we are told more stories about AJ. After briefly describing Interzone, the novel breaks into sub-stories and heavily cut-up influenced passages.


title: Naked Lunch

text: In a sudden return to what seems to be Lee's reality, two police officers, Hauser and O'Brien, catch up with Lee, who kills both of them. Lee then goes out to a street phone booth and calls the Narcotics Squad, saying he wants to speak to O'Brien. A Lieutenant Gonzales on the other end of the line claims there's no one in their records called O'Brien. When Lee asks for Hauser instead, the reply is identical; Lee hangs up, and goes on the run once again. The book then becomes increasingly disjointed and impressionistic, and finally simply stops.


title: Naked Lunch

text: "Naked Lunch" is considered Burroughs' seminal work. Extremely controversial in both its subject matter and its use of obscene language (something Burroughs recognized and intended), the book was banned in Boston and Los Angeles in the United States, and several European publishers were harassed. It was one of the more recent American books over which an obscenity trial has been held.


title: Naked Lunch

text: The book was banned in Boston in 1962 due to obscenity (notably child murder and acts of pedophilia), making it among the last works to be banned in that city, but that decision was reversed in 1966 by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The Appeals Court found the book did not violate obscenity statutes, as it was found to have some social value. The hearing included testimony in support of the work by Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer.


title: Naked Lunch

text: Sections of the manuscript were published in the Spring 1958 edition of Robert Creeley's "Black Mountain Review" and in the Spring 1958 edition of the University of Chicago student-run publication "Chicago Review". The student edition was not well received, and caused the university administration to discuss the future censorship of the Winter 1959 edition of the publication, resulting in the resignation of all but one of the editors. When the editor Paul Carroll published "BIG TABLE" Magazine (Issue No. 1, Spring 1959) alongside former "Chicago Review" editor Irving Rosenthal, he was found guilty of sending obscene material through the U.S. mail for including "Ten Episodes from "Naked Lunch"", a piece of writing the Judicial Officer for the United States Post Office Department deemed "undisciplined prose, far more akin to the early work of experimental adolescents than to anything of literary merit" and initially judged it as non-mailable under the provisions of .


title: Naked Lunch

text: On a more specific level, "Naked Lunch" also protests the death penalty. In Burroughs's "Deposition: A Testimony Concerning A Sickness", "The Blue Movies" (appearing in the vignette "A.J.'s Annual Party") is deemed "a tract against capital punishment."


title: Naked Lunch

text: Fans of Beat Generation literature, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker named their band Steely Dan after a "revolutionary" steam-powered dildo mentioned in the novel.


title: Naked Lunch

text: From the 1960s, numerous film-makers considered adapting "Naked Lunch" for the screen. Antony Balch, who worked with Burroughs on a number of short film projects in 1960s, considered making a musical with Mick Jagger in the lead role, but the project fell through when relationships soured between Balch and Jagger. Burroughs himself adapted his book for the never-made film; after Jagger dropped out, Dennis Hopper was considered for the lead role, and at one point game-show producer Chuck Barris was considered a possible financier of the project.


title: Naked Lunch

text: In May 1991, rather than attempting a straight adaptation, Canadian director David Cronenberg took a few elements from the book and combined them with elements of Burroughs' life, creating a hybrid film about the writing of the book rather than the book itself. Peter Weller starred as William Lee, the pseudonym Burroughs used when he wrote "Junkie".


title: Naked Lunch

text: Italian comics artist Gianluca Lerici, better known under his artistic pseudonym Professor Bad Trip, adapted the novel into a graphic novel titled "Il Pasto Nudo" (1992), published by Shake Edizioni.


title: Naked Lunch

text: Unabridged readings of both the original text and the "Restored Text" edition have been made available through services such as Audible. Burroughs himself made many recordings over the years of excerpts from the book, many released on albums from Giorno Poetry Systems (GPS) and on Burroughs' later pseudo-musical albums "Dead City Radio" and "Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales".


title: Naked Lunch

text: A recording of Frank Zappa reading the book's "Talking Asshole" body horror vignette was made during the Nova Convention of 1979 and later included on the GPS soundtrack album of the event.


title: Zaragoza

text: Zaragoza, also known in English as Saragossa, is the capital city of the Zaragoza Province and of the autonomous community of Aragon, Spain. It lies by the Ebro river and its tributaries, the Huerva and the Gállego, roughly in the center of both Aragon and the Ebro basin.


title: Zaragoza

text: On 1 January 2021 the population of the municipality of Zaragoza was 675,301, (the fifth most populated in Spain) on a land area of . The population of the metropolitan area was estimated in 2006 at 783,763 inhabitants. The municipality is home to more than 50 percent of the Aragonese population.


title: Zaragoza

text: Zaragoza hosted Expo 2008 in the summer of 2008, a world's fair on water and sustainable development. It was also a candidate for the European Capital of Culture in 2012.


title: Zaragoza

text: The city is famous for its folklore, local cuisine, and landmarks such as the Basílica del Pilar, La Seo Cathedral and the Aljafería Palace. Together with La Seo and the Aljafería, several other buildings form part of the Mudéjar Architecture of Aragon which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The "Fiestas del Pilar" are among the most celebrated festivals in Spain.


title: Zaragoza

text: The Iberian town that preceded Roman colonisation was called "Salduie" or "". The Romans and Greeks called the ancient city (in Greek ), from which derive the Arabic name (used during the Al-Andalus period), the medieval , and the modern "Zaragoza".


title: Zaragoza

text: The Sedetani, a tribe of ancient Iberians, populated a village called ( in Roman sources). Later on, Augustus founded a city called "Caesaraugusta" at the same location to settle army veterans from the Cantabrian wars. The foundation date of "Caesaraugusta" has not been set with exact precision, though it is known to lie between 25 BC and 11 BC.


title: Zaragoza

text: The city did not suffer any decline during the last centuries of the Roman empire and was captured peacefully by the Goths in the fifth century AD.


title: Zaragoza

text: In the eighth century, following the Umayyad conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, Zaragoza became the capital of the Upper March of al-Andalus.


title: Zaragoza

text: In 1018, amid the collapse of the Caliphate of Córdoba, Zaragoza became an independent Taifa of Zaragoza, initially controlled by the Tujibid family, then ruled by the Banu Hud from 1039. The taifa greatly prospered in a cultural and political sense in the late 11th century, and being later governed by Ahmad al-Muqtadir, Yusuf al-Mu'taman ibn Hud and Al-Musta'in II. It fell to the Almoravids in 1110.


title: Zaragoza

text: On 18 December 1118, Alfonso I of Aragon conquered the city from the Almoravids, and made it the capital of the Kingdom of Aragon. After Alfonso's death without heirs in 1134, Zaragoza was swiftly occupied by Alfonso VII of León. The city control was held by García Ramírez, king of Navarra, until 1136 when it was given to Ramiro II the Monk in the treaty signed at the betrothal of Ramiro's daughter Petronila and Alfonso's son Sancho. The wedding never happened, as Petronila eventually married Ramon Berenguer IV, Count of Barcelona. The marriage union was the origin of the Crown of Aragón, and union with Castile would not happen for another 333 years, when King Ferdinand II of Aragon and his wife, Queen Isabella I of Castile, each took their respective thrones.


title: Zaragoza

text: 13th century Zaragoza was the scene of two controversial martyrdoms related with the Spanish Inquisition: those of Saint Dominguito del Val, a choirboy in the basilica, and Pedro de Arbués, head official of the inquisition. While the reality of the existence of Dominguito del Val is questioned, his "murder" at the hands of "jealous Jews" was used as an excuse to murder or convert the Jewish population of Zaragoza.


title: Zaragoza

text: An outbreak of bubonic plague decimated the city in 1564. It reportedly killed about 10,000 people out of an estimated population of 25–30,000.


title: Zaragoza

text: In the context of the 1701–1714 War of Spanish Succession, the city rose in arms in favour of the Archduke Charles, who was proclaimed "King of Aragon" in the city on 29 June 1706, following the uprising of other parts of the Kingdom of Aragon in December 1705. Charles entered the city in July 1706, directing the attack on those places of Aragon that had sided with the Bourbon faction such as Borja or the Cinco Villas. Following the April 1707 battle at Almansa, the tide turned with the "Austracist" forces fleeing in disarray, and the Bourbon forces commanded by the Duke of Orléans entering the city on 26 May 1707. As he seized control of the kingdom, he began to enact the series of institutional reforms known as the Nueva Planta, abolishing the Aragonese institutions in favour of the Castilian ones. The war turned around again in 1710 after the Battle of Almenar, and, following another Bourbon defeat near Zaragoza on 20 August 1710, Archduke Charles returned to the city on the next day. This was for only a brief period, though, as following the entry of Philip V in Madrid and the ensuing Battle of Villaviciosa in December 1710, the Habsburg armies fled from Zaragoza in haste in December 1710 and Philip V proceeded to consolidate his rule over the kingdom of Aragon, resuming administrative reforms after a period of institutional void.


title: Zaragoza

text: An important food riot caused by the high price of bread and other necessity goods took place in the city in April 1766, the so-called , named after the repressive agents, volunteer farmers and craftsmen who wielded swords and bucklers (). The repression left about 300 wounded, 200 detainees and 8 deaths and it was followed by 17 public executions, and an indeterminate number of killings at the dungeons of the Aljafería.


title: Zaragoza

text: Zaragoza suffered two famous sieges during the Peninsular War against the Napoleonic army: a first from June to August 1808; and a second from December 1808 to February 1809, surrendering only after some 50,000 defenders had died.


title: Zaragoza

text: Railway transport arrived to Zaragoza on 16 September 1861 via the inauguration of the Barcelona–Zaragoza line with the arrival of a train from the former city to the Estación del Norte. The opening of the Madrid–Zaragoza line took place a year and a half later, on 16 May 1863.


title: Zaragoza

text: The July 1936 coup d'état (with Gral. Miguel Cabanellas, Col. , , , Major Cebollero and Gral. at the centre of the Mola-led conspiration in Zaragoza) triumphed in the city. The military uprising in Africa on 17 July was followed in the early morning of 19 July by the military command, easily attaining their objectives in Zaragoza, despite the latter's status as stronghold of mobilised labour (most of them CNT anarcho-syndicalists but also UGT trade unionists), as the civil governor critically refused to give weapons to the people in time. Many refugees, including members of the provincial committees of parties and unions, would flee to Caspe, the capital of the territory of Aragon, which was still controlled by the Republic.


title: Zaragoza

text: The rearguard violence committed by the putschists, with already at least 12 murders on 19 July, would only go "in crescendo" along the beginning of the conflict. Thus one of the two big cities under Rebel control since the early stages of the Spanish Civil War along Seville, Zaragoza profited from an increasing industrial production vis-à-vis the war economy, playing a key role for the Francoist faction as ammunition manufacturer.


title: Zaragoza

text: The General Military Academy, a higher training center of the Spanish Army, was re-established on 27 September 1940 by José Enrique Varela, the Francoist Minister of the Army.


title: Zaragoza

text: Following the declaration of Zaragoza as ("Pole for Industrial Development") by the regime in 1964, the city doubled in population in a short time. The increase in population ran parallel to the rural flight and depopulation in the rest of Aragon.


title: Zaragoza

text: In 1979, the Hotel Corona de Aragón fire killed at least 80. The armed Basque nationalist and separatist organization ETA has been blamed, but officially the fire is still regarded as accidental. ETA carried out the Zaragoza barracks bombing in 1987 which killed eleven people, including a number of children, leading to 250,000 people taking part in demonstrations in the city.


title: Zaragoza

text: Since 1982, the city has been home to a large factory built by General Motors for the production of Opel cars, some of which are exported to the United Kingdom and sold under the Vauxhall brand. The city took advantage of the entry of Spain into the European Communities (later European Union).


title: Zaragoza

text: Zaragoza lies in the north-east of the Iberian Peninsula, in the rather arid depression formed by the valley of the Ebro. The Ebro cuts across the city in a west north-west by east south-east direction, entering the municipality at 205 metres above sea level and exiting the municipality at a level of 180 metres above sea level.


title: Zaragoza

text: The city enjoys a beneficial location at the geographical centre of the rough hexagon formed by the Spanish cities of Bilbao, Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona and the French cities of Bordeaux and Toulouse.


title: Zaragoza

text: While the river banks are largely flat, the territory flanking them can display a rugged terrain, featuring and escarpments. The surrounding elevations rise up to heights of about 600–750 metres above sea level. The locations near the meanders of the Ebro feature some sinkholes formed upon the subsidence of the gypsum-rich soil, that can form ponds fed from irrigation water. There is also an instance of seasonal endorheic lagoon, , in the moors located in the southern part of the municipality.


title: Zaragoza

text: The Roman core of Caesaraugusta was founded on the right bank of the Ebro, with the north-east corner limiting the confluence of the Ebro with the Huerva river, a modest right-bank tributary of the Ebro. The Huerva runs through the city buried for much of its lower course. Zaragoza is also located near the confluence of the Ebro with the Gállego, a more voluminous left-bank tributary born in the Pyrenees.


title: Zaragoza

text: Zaragoza has a semi-arid climate (Köppen: "BSk"), as it lies in a wide basin entirely surrounded by mountains which block off moist air from the Atlantic and Mediterranean. The average annual precipitation is a scanty with abundant sunny days, and the rainiest seasons are spring (April–May) and autumn (September–November), with a relative drought in summer (July–August) and winter (December–March).


title: Zaragoza

text: Temperatures are hot in summer reaching up to , and in winter are cool, either because of the fog (about twenty days from November to January ) or a cold and dry wind blowing from the northwest, the "Cierzo" (related to other northerly winds such as the "Mistral" in the SE of France) on clear days. Night frost is common and there is sporadic snowfall.


title: Zaragoza

text: According to a survey carried out by the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS) in 2019 with a sample size of 300, 51.0% of the surveyed people described themselves as non-practising Catholic, 24.0% as practising Catholic, 6.7% as indifferent/non-believer, 5.0% as agnostic, 4.3% as atheist and 2.3% as "other religions", while a 6.7% did not answer.


title: Zaragoza

text: In 2017 there were 64,003 foreign citizens in Zaragoza, which represent 9.6% of the total population. From 2010 to 2017 immigration dropped from 87,735 to 64,003 people, a 27% drop. Romanians represent 29.8% of foreigners living in Zaragoza, or 2.9% of the total city population, followed by Moroccans (9.1%) and Chinese (7%).


title: Zaragoza

text: An Opel factory was opened in 1982 in Figueruelas, a small village nearby. The automotive industry is a main pillar of the regional economy along with Balay, which manufactures household appliances; CAF, which builds railway rolling stock for both the national and international markets; SAICA and Torraspapel in the stationery sector; and various other local companies, such as Pikolin, Lacasa, and Imaginarium SA.


title: Zaragoza

text: The city's economy benefited from projects like the Expo 2008, the official World's Fair, whose theme was water and sustainable development, held between 14 June and 14 September 2008, (PLAZA), and the (PTR). Furthermore, since December 2003, it has been a city through which the AVE high-speed rail travels. Currently, Zaragoza Airport is a major cargo hub in the Iberian Peninsula, behind only Madrid, Barcelona, and Lisbon.


title: Zaragoza

text: Zaragoza is home to a Spanish Air and Space Force base, which was shared with the U.S. Air Force until 1994. In English, the base was known as Zaragoza Air Base. The Spanish Air Force maintained a McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet wing at the base. No American flying wings (with the exception of a few KC-135s) were permanently based there, but it served as a training base for American fighter squadrons across Europe. It also hosts the main Spanish Army academy, "Academia General Militar", a number of brigades at "San Gregorio", and other garrisons.


title: Zaragoza

text: Christianity took root in Zaragoza at an early date. According to legend, St. Mary appeared miraculously to Saint James the Great in Zaragoza in the first century, standing on a pillar. This apparition is commemorated by a famous Catholic basilica called "Nuestra Señora del Pilar" ('Our Lady of the Pillar').


title: Zaragoza

text: The Aragonese language, in decline for centuries and restricted mostly to northern Aragon, has recently attracted more people in the region. Thus, nowadays, in Zaragoza, up to 7,000 people speak Aragonese.


title: Zaragoza

text: The annual "Fiestas del Pilar" last for nine days, with its main day on 12 October. Since this date coincided in 1492 with the first sighting by Christopher Columbus of the Americas, that day is also celebrated as (Columbus Day) by Spanish-speaking people worldwide.


title: Zaragoza

text: There are many activities during the festival, from the massively attended (opening speech) to the final fireworks display over the Ebro; they also include marching bands, dances such as (the most popular folk music dance), a procession of "gigantes y cabezudos", concerts, exhibitions, "vaquillas", bullfights, fairground amusements, and fireworks. Some of the most important events are the , or Flower Offering to St. Mary of the Pillar, on 12 October, when an enormous surface resembling a cloak for St. Mary is covered with flowers, and the on 13 October, when all the autonomous communities of Spain offer their typical regional dishes to St. Mary and donate them to soup kitchens.


title: Zaragoza

text: Holy Week in Zaragoza, although not as elaborate an affair as its Andalusian or Bajo Aragón counterparts, has several processions passing through the city centre every day with dramatic sculptures, black-dressed praying women and hundreds of hooded people playing drums. It has been a Festival of International Tourist Interest since 2014.


title: Zaragoza

text: The University of Zaragoza is based in the city. As one of the oldest universities in Spain and a major research and development centre, this public university awards all the highest academic degrees in dozens of fields. Zaragoza is also home to the MIT-Zaragoza International Logistics Program, a unique partnership between MIT, the Government of Aragon and the University of Zaragoza.


title: Zaragoza

text: There is also a private university, Universidad San Jorge, which is located in Villanueva de Gállego.


title: Zaragoza

text: The city is connected by motorway with the main cities in central and northern Spain, including Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and Bilbao, all of which are located about 300 kilometres (200 miles) from Zaragoza.


title: Zaragoza

text: The city has a network of buses which is controlled by the Urban Buses of Zaragoza (AUZSA). The network consists of 31 regular lines (two of them circle lines), two scheduled routes, six shuttle buses (one free), and seven night buses operating on Fridays, Saturdays and other festivities. Zaragoza also has an interurban bus network operated by Transport Consortium Zaragoza Area (CTAZ) that operates 17 regular lines.


title: Zaragoza

text: Zaragoza's bicycle lanes facilitate non-motorised travel and help cyclists to avoid running into pedestrians and motor vehicles. The city council also has a public bicycle-hire scheme, the , which has an annual charge.


title: Zaragoza

text: Zaragoza is a part of the Spanish high-speed railway operated by Renfe, AVE, which connects Madrid, Lleida, Tarragona, Barcelona and Figueres via high-speed rail. Madrid can be reached in 75 minutes, and Barcelona in approximately 90 minutes. The central station is Zaragoza–Delicias railway station, which serves both railway lines and coaches. In addition to long-distance railway lines and the high-speed trains, Zaragoza has a network of commuter trains operated by Renfe called "Cercanías Zaragoza".


title: Zaragoza

text: It is a major commercial airport, its freight traffic surpassing that of Barcelona El Prat in 2012, and serves as the home of the Spanish Air Force's 15th Group. It was also used by NASA as a contingency landing site for the Space Shuttle in the case of a Transoceanic Abort Landing (TAL).


title: Zaragoza

text: The average amount of time people spend commuting with public transit in Zaragoza, for example to and from work, on a weekday is 48 minutes. 9% of public transit riders ride for more than two hours every day. The average amount of time people wait at a stop or station for public transit is 11 minutes, while 12% of riders wait for over 20 minutes on average every day. The average distance people usually ride in a single trip with public transit is , while 5% travel over in a single direction.


title: Zaragoza

text: Zaragoza's main football team, Real Zaragoza, plays in the Segunda División. Founded on 18 March 1932, its home games are played at La Romareda, which seats 34,596 spectators. The club has spent the majority of its history in La Liga. One of the most remarkable events in the team's recent history is the winning of the former UEFA Cup Winners' Cup in 1995. The team has also won the Spanish National Cup, Copa del Rey, six times: 1965, 1966, 1986, 1994, 2001 and 2004 and an Inter-Cities Fairs Cup (1964). A government survey in 2007 found that 2.7% of the Spanish population support the club, making them the seventh-most supported in the country.


title: Zaragoza

text: Zaragoza's second football team is CD Ebro. Founded in 1942, it plays in Segunda División B – Group 2, holding home games at Campo Municipal de Fútbol La Almozara, which has a capacity of 1,000 seats.


title: Zaragoza

text: Zaragoza was one of the Spanish cities which hosted the FIFA World Cup 1982. Three matches were played at La Romareda.


title: Zaragoza

text: The main basketball team, Basket Zaragoza, known as "Tecnyconta Zaragoza" for sponsorship reasons, plays in the Liga ACB. They play their home games at the Pabellón Principe Felipe with a capacity of 10,744.


title: Zaragoza

text: Stadium Casablanca, a.k.a. "Mann Filter" for sponsorship reasons, is the Spanish women's basketball club from Zaragoza that plays in the Primera Division.


title: Zaragoza

text: The main futsal team, is Dlink Zaragoza, plays in the LNFS Primera División. They play at the Pabellón Siglo XXI with a capacity of 2,600.


title: Zaragoza

text: The Spanish Baja or Baja Aragon is a Rally raid event held in the region of Aragon in northern Spain. This event was launched in 1983, and chose the desert of Monegros because of the scenery and availability of service infrastructure in Zaragoza.


title: Zaragoza

text: Near the basilica on the banks of the Ebro are located the city hall, the Lonja (old currency exchange), La Seo (literally 'the See' in the Aragonese language) or Cathedral of San Salvador, a church built over the main mosque (partially preserved in the 11th-century north wall of the Parroquieta), with Romanesque apses from the 12th century; inside, the imposing hall church from the 15th to 16th centuries, the Baroque tower, and finally, with its famous Museum of Tapestries near the Roman ruins of forum and port city wall.


title: Zaragoza

text: Some distance from the centre of the old city is the Moorish castle (or palace) Aljafería, the most important Moorish buildings in northern Spain and the setting for Giuseppe Verdi's opera "Il trovatore" ("The Troubadour"). The Aragonese parliament currently sits in the building.


title: Zaragoza

text: The churches of San Pablo, Santa María Magdalena and San Gil Abad were built in the 14th century, but the towers may be old minarets dating from the 11th century; San Miguel (14th century); Santiago (San Ildefonso) and the Fecetas monastery are Baroque with Mudéjar ceilings of the 17th century. All the churches are Mudéjar monuments that comprise a World Heritage Site.


title: Zaragoza

text: Other important sights are the stately houses and palaces in the city, mainly of the 16th century: palaces of the count of Morata or Luna (Audiencia), Deán, Torrero (), Don Lope or Real Maestranza, count of Sástago, count of Argillo (today the Pablo Gargallo museum), archbishop, etc.


title: Zaragoza

text: On 14 June 2008, the site of Expo 2008 opened its doors to the public. The exhibition ran until 14 September.


title: Saarland

text: The Saarland (, ; ) is a state of Germany in the south west of the country. With an area of and population of 990,509 in 2018, it is the smallest German state in area apart from the city-states of Berlin, Bremen, and Hamburg, and the smallest in population apart from Bremen. Saarbrücken is the state capital and largest city; other cities include Neunkirchen and Saarlouis. Saarland is mainly surrounded by the department of Moselle (Grand Est) in France to the west and south and the neighboring state of Rhineland-Palatinate in Germany to the north and east; it also shares a small border about long with the canton of Remich in Luxembourg to the northwest.


title: Saarland

text: Saarland was established in 1920 after World War I as the Territory of the Saar Basin, occupied and governed by France under a League of Nations mandate. The heavily industrialized region was economically valuable, due to the wealth of its coal deposits and location on the border between France and Germany. Saarland was returned to Nazi Germany in the 1935 Saar status referendum. Following World War II, the French military administration in Allied-occupied Germany organized the territory as the Saar Protectorate on 16 February 1946. After the 1955 Saar Statute referendum, it joined the Federal Republic of Germany as a state on 1 January 1957. Saarland used its own currency, the Saar franc, and postage stamps issued specially for the territory until 1959.


title: Saarland

text: The region of the Saarland was settled by the Celtic tribes of Treveri and Mediomatrici. The most impressive relic of their time is the remains of a fortress of refuge at Otzenhausen in the north of the Saarland. In the 1st century BC, the Roman Empire made the region part of its province of Belgica. The Celtic population mixed with the Roman immigrants. The region gained wealth, which can still be seen in the remains of Roman villas and villages.


title: Saarland

text: Roman rule ended in the 5th century, when the Franks conquered the territory. For the next 1,300 years the region shared the history of the Kingdom of the Franks, the Carolingian Empire and of the Holy Roman Empire. The region of the Saarland was divided into several small territories, some of which were ruled by sovereigns of adjoining regions. Most important of the local rulers were the counts of Nassau-Saarbrücken. Within the Holy Roman Empire these territories gained a wide range of independence, threatened, however, by the French kings, who sought, from the 17th century onwards, to incorporate all the territories on the western side of the river Rhine and repeatedly invaded the area in 1635, in 1676, in 1679, and in 1734, extending their realm to the river Saar and establishing the city and stronghold of Saarlouis in 1680.


title: Saarland

text: It was not the king of France but the armies of the French Revolution who terminated the independence of the states in the region of the Saarland. After 1792 they conquered the region and made it part of the French Republic. While a strip in the west belonged to the Département Moselle, the centre in 1798 became part of the Département de Sarre, and the east became part of the Département du Mont-Tonnerre. After the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the region was divided again. Most of it became part of the Prussian Rhine Province. Another part in the east, corresponding to the present Saarpfalz district, was allocated to the Kingdom of Bavaria. A small part in the northeast was ruled by the Duke of Oldenburg.


title: Saarland

text: On 31 July 1870, the French Emperor Napoleon III ordered an invasion across the River Saar to seize Saarbrücken. The first shots of the Franco-Prussian War 1870/71 were fired on the heights of Spichern, south of Saarbrücken. The Saar region became part of the German Empire which came into existence on 18 January 1871, during the course of this war.


title: Saarland

text: In 1920 the Saargebiet was occupied by Britain and France under the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. The occupied area included portions of the Prussian Rhine Province and the Bavarian Rhenish Palatinate. In practice the region was administered by France. In 1920 this was formalized by a 15-year League of Nations mandate.


title: Saarland

text: In 1933, a considerable number of communists and other political opponents of National Socialism fled to the Saar, as it was the only part of Germany that remained outside national administration following the First World War. As a result, anti-Nazi groups agitated for the Saarland to remain under French administration. However, with most of the population being ethnically German, such views were considered suspect or even treasonous, and therefore found little support.


title: Saarland

text: When the original 15-year term was over, a plebiscite was held in the territory on 13 January 1935: 90.8% of those voting favoured rejoining Germany.


title: Saarland

text: Following the referendum Josef Bürckel was appointed on 1 March 1935 as the German Reich's commissioner for reintegration (). When the reincorporation was considered accomplished, his title was changed (after 17 June 1936) to (Reich Commissioner for the Saarland). In September 1939, in response to the German Invasion of Poland, French forces invaded the Saarland in a half-hearted offensive, occupying some villages and meeting little resistance, before withdrawing. A further change was made after 8 April 1940 to (Reich Commissioner for the Saar Palatinate); finally, after 11 March 1941, Bürckel was made (Reich Governor of the Western Borderland). He died on 28 September 1944 and was succeeded by Willi Stöhr, who remained in office until the region fell to advancing American forces in March 1945.


title: Saarland

text: After World War II, the Saarland came under French occupation and administration again, as the Saar Protectorate. France did not annex the Saar or expel the local German population, as opposed to the fate of Upper Silesia which was annexed by Poland in 1949 in accordance with the peace treaty between Poland and the GDR/East Germany (see also Allied-occupied Germany). In his speech "Restatement of Policy on Germany", made in Stuttgart on 6 September 1946, United States Secretary of State James F. Byrnes stated the U.S. position on detaching the Saar from Germany: "The United States does not feel that it can deny to France, which has been invaded three times by Germany in 70 years, its claim to the Saar territory".


title: Saarland

text: The Saar and Ruhr areas were historically a central location for coal mining. This attracted the steel industry, which is essential for the production of munitions. The Treaty of Paris (1951) established the European Coal and Steel Community, which led to the termination of the International Authority for the Ruhr (whose purpose was to regulate Ruhr coal and steel production and distribution). However, the Treaty sidestepped the issue of the Saar protectorate: an attached protocol stated Germany and France agreed the Treaty would have no bearing on their views of the status of the Saar.


title: Saarland

text: In 1948, the French government established the Saarland University under the auspices of the University of Nancy. It is the principal university in the "Bundesland", the other being .


title: Saarland

text: The Saar Protectorate was headed by a military governor from 30 August 1945: Gilbert Yves Edmond Grandval (1904 – 1981), who remained, on 1 January 1948, as High Commissioner, and January 1952 – June 1955 as the first of two French ambassadors, his successor being Éric de Carbonnel (1910 – 1965) until 1956.


title: Saarland

text: In 1954, France and the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) developed a detailed plan called the "Saarstatut" (Saar Statute) to establish an independent Saarland. It was signed as an agreement between the two countries on 23 October 1954 as one of the Paris Pacts, but a plebiscite held on 23 October 1955 rejected it by 67.7%.


title: Saarland

text: On 27 October 1956, the Saar Treaty declared that Saarland should be allowed to join the Federal Republic of Germany, which it did on 1 January 1957. This was the last significant international border change in Europe until the fall of Communism over 30 years later.


title: Saarland

text: The Saarland's unification with the Federal Republic of Germany was sometimes referred to as the ' (little reunification in contrast with the post-Cold War absorption of the GDR (')). After unification, the Saar franc remained as the territory's currency until West Germany's Deutsche Mark replaced it on 7 July 1959. The Saar Treaty established that French, not English as in the rest of West Germany, should remain the first foreign language taught in Saarland schools; this provision was still largely followed after it was no longer binding.


title: Saarland

text: Since 1971, Saarland has been a member of SaarLorLux, a euroregion created from Saarland, Lorraine, Luxembourg, Rhineland Palatinate, and Wallonia.


title: Saarland

text: The state borders France ("département" of Moselle, which forms part of the "région" of Grand Est) to the south and west, Luxembourg (Grevenmacher District) to the west and Rheinland-Pfalz to the north and the east.


title: Saarland

text: It is named after the river Saar, a tributary of the Moselle (itself a tributary of the Rhine), which runs through the state from the south to the northwest. One third of the land area of the Saarland is covered by forest, one of the highest percentages in Germany. The state is generally hilly; the highest mountain is the Dollberg with a height of 695.4 m (2281 feet).


title: Saarland

text: Most inhabitants live in a city agglomeration on the French border, surrounding the capital of Saarbrücken.


title: Saarland

text: Saarland is the most religious state in Germany. The adherents of the Catholic Church comprise 56.8% of the population, organised in the two dioceses of Trier (comprising the formerly Prussian part of Saarland) and Speyer (for the smaller eastern formerly Palatine part). 17.5% of the Saarlandic population adhere to the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), organised in the two Landeskirchen named Evangelical Church in the Rhineland and Evangelical Church of the Palatinate, both following the same former territorial partition. 25.7% are not affiliated with one of these churches.


title: Saarland

text: Saarland has the highest concentration of Roman Catholics of any German state, and is the only state in which Catholics form an absolute majority (over 50%).


title: Saarland

text: Except for the periods between 1985 and 1999, as well as since 2022 – when the centre-left Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) has held a majority of seats in the Landtag (state diet) – the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has governed the Saarland, either alone or in coalition, since the accession of the state to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1957.


title: Saarland

text: After the 2022 state elections the previous Grand Coalition between the CDU and SPD, the two largest parties in the Landtag, was replaced by an SPD majority government, the only single-party majority government of any German state, led by minister-president Anke Rehlinger.


title: Saarland

text: The Gross domestic product (GDP) of the state was 35.4 billion euros in 2018, accounting for 1.1% of German economic output. GDP per capita adjusted for purchasing power was 32,800 euros or 109% of the EU27 average in the same year. The GDP per employee was 93% of the EU average. The GDP per capita was the second lowest of all states in West Germany.


title: Saarland

text: Important income sources are the automobile industry, steel industry, ceramic industry and computer science and information systems industry. In the past, coal mining was an important branch of industry. However, the last coal mine in Saarland closed in 2012, ending 250 years of coal mining history in the region. The decision to close the mines was motivated by safety concerns about earthquakes in the region.


title: Saarland

text: The unemployment rate stood at 5.8% in October 2018 and was higher than the national average but below the EU28 average.


title: Saarland

text: Saarland is home to the Saarland University and the administrative headquarters of the Franco-German University.


title: Saarland

text: People in the Saarland speak Rhine Franconian (in the southeast, very similar to that dialect spoken in the western part of the Palatinate) and Moselle Franconian (in the northwest, very similar to that dialect spoken along the river Moselle and the cities of Trier or even in Luxembourg). Outside of the Saarland, specifically the Rhine-Franconian variant spoken in the state capital Saarbrücken is generally considered to be "the" Saarland dialect. The two dialect regions are mainly separated by the "das / dat" isogloss; in the northwestern portion of the state, including cities such as Saarlouis, standard German "das" is pronounced with a final [t] instead of an [s].


title: Saarland

text: Both dialects, particularly in their respective Saarland flavour, share many characteristic features, some of which will be explained below.


title: Saarland

text: Women and girls are often referred to using the neuter pronoun "es", with the pronunciation being something like "Ähs": Ähs hat mir's gesaat" (it told me so', instead of she told me so'; vs. High German: Sie hat es mir gesagt"). This stems from the word "Mädchen" (girl) being neuter in German ("es" is correct in German when referring to words like "Mädchen" but would not be used by itself in reference to a woman).


title: Saarland

text: The conjunctive in Rhine Franconian is normally composed with the words "dääd" (High German "tät" = “would do”) or "gäng" (“would go”) as auxiliary verbs: "Isch dääd saan, dass..." (“I would say that...”) instead of the High German "Ich würde sagen, dass...".


title: Saarland

text: Diphthongs are less common than in Standard German. This is because the Standard German diphthongs "ei" and "au" are each the result of a merger of two Middle High German vowels – however, these mergers did not take place in the Saarland, and only one of the two merged vowels is pronounced as a diphthong. The front rounded vowels "ö", "ü", and "eu" are replaced by "e", "i", and "ei" respectively.


title: Saarland

text: Both the Rhine Franconian and Moselle Franconian dialects (and Luxemburgish) have merged the palatal fricative sound as in "ich" with the post-alveolar fricative as in "frisch" 'fresh', causing minimal pairs such as "Kirche" 'church' and "Kirsche" 'cherry' to be pronounced in the same way.


title: Saarland

text: French has had a considerable influence on the vocabulary, although the pronunciation of imported French words is usually quite different from their originals. Popular examples include "Trottwaa" (from "trottoir"), "Fissääl" (from "ficelle"), and the imperative or greeting "aalleh!" (from "allez!").


title: Saarland

text: The English sentence 'My house is green' is pronounced almost the same in the Rhine Franconian variant: "Mei Haus is grien". The main difference lies in the pronunciation of the "r" sound.


title: Saarland

text: Regional beer brewer Karlsberg has taken advantage of the Saarlandish dialect to create clever advertising for its staple product, UrPils. Examples include a trio of men enjoying a beer, flanked by baby carriages, the slogan reading ""Mutter schafft"" (meaning "Mum's at work" in Saarlandish, but plays on the High German word "Mutterschaft", or "motherhood"); another depicts a trio of men at a bar, with one realizing his beer has been drunk by one of the others, the slogan reading ""Kenner war's"" (meaning "It was no one" ["Keiner war es"] in Saarlandish, but playing on the High German word ""Kenner"", or "connoisseur", translating to "It was a connoisseur"); a third shows an empty beer crate in the middle of outer space, the text reading ""All"" (meaning "empty" in Saarlandish, but playing on the same High German word meaning "outer space").


title: Saarland

text: The French language has a special standing in Saarland due to its geographical proximity to France. Today, a large part of the population is able to speak French, and it is compulsory at many schools. Saarbrücken is also home to a bilingual "Deutsch-Französisches Gymnasium" (German-French high school). In January 2014 the Saarland state government announced its aim of making the region fully bilingual in German and French by 2043.


title: Saarland

text: The Saar competed in the qualifying section of the 1954 FIFA World Cup, but failed after coming second to West Germany but ahead of Norway. It also competed as Saar in the 1952 Summer Olympics and the field handball world championships in the beginning of the 1950s.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: The Madoff investment scandal was a major case of stock and securities fraud discovered in late 2008. In December of that year, Bernie Madoff, the former NASDAQ chairman and founder of the Wall Street firm Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, admitted that the wealth management arm of his business was an elaborate multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Madoff founded Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC in 1960, and was its chairman until his arrest. The firm employed Madoff's brother Peter as senior managing director and chief compliance officer, Peter's daughter Shana Madoff as rules and compliance officer and attorney, and Madoff's sons Mark and Andrew. Peter was sentenced to 10 years in prison, and Mark died by suicide exactly two years after his father's arrest.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Alerted by his sons, federal authorities arrested Madoff on December 11, 2008. On March 12, 2009, Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 federal crimes and admitted to operating the largest private Ponzi scheme in history. On June 29, 2009, he was sentenced to 150 years in prison with restitution of $170 billion. He died in prison in 2021.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: According to the original federal charges, Madoff said that his firm had "liabilities of approximately US$50 billion." Prosecutors estimated the size of the fraud to be $64.8 billion, based on the amounts in the accounts of Madoff's 4,800 clients as of November 30, 2008. Ignoring opportunity costs and taxes paid on fictitious profits, about half of Madoff's direct investors lost no money. Harry Markopolos, a whistleblower whose repeated warnings about Madoff were ignored, estimated that at least $35 billion of the money Madoff claimed to have stolen never really existed, but was simply fictional profits he reported to his clients.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Investigators determined that others were involved in the scheme. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was criticized for not investigating Madoff more thoroughly; questions about his firm had been raised as early as 1999. The legitimate trading arm of Madoff's business that was run by his two sons was one of the top market makers on Wall Street, and in 2008 was the sixth-largest.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Madoff's personal and business asset freeze created a chain reaction throughout the world's business and philanthropic community, forcing many organizations to at least temporarily close, including the Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation, the Picower Foundation, and the JEHT Foundation.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Madoff started his firm in 1960 as a penny stock trader with $5,000 , earned from working as a lifeguard and sprinkler installer, and $50,000 that he had borrowed from his in-laws . His fledgling business, which he founded with his high school sweetheart Ruth Alpern, began to grow with the assistance of his father-in-law, accountant Saul Alpern, who referred a circle of friends and their families.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Initially, the firm made markets (quoted bid and ask prices) via the National Quotation Bureau's Pink Sheets. To compete with firms that were members of the New York Stock Exchange trading on the stock exchange's floor, his firm began using innovative computer information technology to disseminate quotes. After a trial run, the technology that the firm helped develop became the NASDAQ. At one point, Madoff Securities was the largest buying-and-selling "market maker" at the NASDAQ.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: He was active in the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), a self-regulatory securities industry organization, serving as the chairman of the board of directors and on the board of governors.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Several family members worked for him. His younger brother, Peter, was senior managing director and chief compliance officer, and Peter's daughter, Shana Madoff, was the compliance attorney. Madoff's sons, Mark and Andrew, worked in the trading section, along with Charles Weiner, Madoff's nephew. Andrew Madoff invested his own money in his father's fund, but Mark stopped in about 2001.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Federal investigators believe the fraud in the investment management division and advisory division may have begun in the 1970s. However, Madoff himself stated his fraudulent activities began in the 1990s. Madoff's fraudulent activities are believed to have accelerated after the 2001 change from fractional share trades to decimals in the NYSE, which cut significantly into his legitimate profits as a market-maker. With fractional trades Madoff profited up to 12.5 cents with each trade handled by his firm, but following decimalization this bid ask spread between sellers and buyers was reduced to as low as one cent.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: In the 1980s, Madoff's market-maker division traded up to 5% of the total volume made on the New York Stock Exchange. Madoff was "the first prominent practitioner" of payment for order flow, paying brokers to execute their clients' orders through his brokerage, a practice some have called a "legal kickback". This practice gave Madoff the distinction of being the largest dealer in NYSE-listed stocks in the U.S., trading about 15% of transaction volume. Academics have questioned the ethics of these payments. Madoff has argued that these payments did not alter the price that the customer received. He viewed payments for order flow as a normal business practice: "If your girlfriend goes to buy stockings at a supermarket, the racks that display those stockings are usually paid for by the company that manufactured the stockings. Order flow is an issue that attracted a lot of attention but is grossly overrated."


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: By 2000, Madoff Securities, one of the top traders of US securities, held approximately $300 million in assets . The business occupied three floors of the Lipstick Building in Manhattan, with the investment management division on the 17th floor, referred to as the "hedge fund", employing a staff of less than 24. Madoff also ran a branch office in London that employed 28 people, separate from Madoff Securities. The company handled investments for his family of approximately £80 million. Two remote cameras installed in the London office permitted Madoff to monitor events from New York.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: After 41 years as a sole proprietorship, Madoff converted his firm into a limited liability company in 2001, with himself as the sole shareholder.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: In 1992, Bernard Madoff explained his purported strategy to "The Wall Street Journal". He said his returns were really nothing special, given that the Standard & Poors 500-stock index generated an average annual return of 16.3% between November 1982 and November 1992. "I would be surprised if anybody thought that matching the S&P over 10 years was anything outstanding." The majority of money managers actually trailed the S&P 500 during the 1980s. The "Journal" concluded Madoff's use of futures and options helped cushion the returns against the market's ups and downs. Madoff said he made up for the cost of the hedges, which could have caused him to trail the stock market's returns, with stock-picking and market timing.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Madoff's sales pitch was an investment strategy consisting of purchasing blue-chip stocks and taking options contracts on them, sometimes called a split-strike conversion or a collar. "Typically, a position will consist of the ownership of 30–35 S&P 100 stocks, most correlated to that index, the sale of out-of-the-money 'calls' on the index and the purchase of out-of-the-money 'puts' on the index. The sale of the 'calls' is designed to increase the rate of return, while allowing upward movement of the stock portfolio to the strike price of the 'calls'. The 'puts', funded in large part by the sales of the 'calls', limit the portfolio's downside."


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: In his 1992 "Avellino and Bienes" interview with "The Wall Street Journal", Madoff discussed his supposed methods: In the 1970s, he had placed invested funds in "convertible arbitrage positions in large-cap stocks, with promised investment returns of 18% to 20%", and in 1982, he began using futures contracts on the stock index, and then placed put options on futures during the 1987 stock market crash. A few analysts performing due diligence had been unable to replicate the Madoff fund's past returns using historic price data for U.S. stocks and options on the indexes. "Barron's" raised the possibility that Madoff's returns were most likely due to front running his firm's brokerage clients.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Mitchell Zuckoff, professor of journalism at Boston University and author of "Ponzi's Scheme: The True Story of a Financial Legend," says that "the 5% payout rule", a federal law requiring private foundations to pay out 5% of their funds each year, allowed Madoff's Ponzi scheme to go undetected for a long period since he managed money mainly for charities. Zuckoff notes, "For every $1 billion in foundation investment, Madoff was effectively on the hook for about $50 million in withdrawals a year. If he was not making real investments, at that rate the principal would last 20 years. By targeting charities, Madoff could avoid the threat of sudden or unexpected withdrawals.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: In his guilty plea, Madoff admitted that he had not actually traded since the early 1990s, and all of his returns since then had been fabricated. However, David Sheehan, principal investigator for trustee Irving Picard, believes the wealth management arm of Madoff's business had been a fraud from the start.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Madoff's operation differed from a typical Ponzi scheme. While most Ponzi schemes are based on nonexistent businesses, Madoff's brokerage operation arm was very real. At the time of its shuttering, it handled large trades for institutional investors.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Madoff was a "master marketer" who, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, built a reputation as a wealth manager for a highly exclusive clientele. Investors who gained access, typically on word-of-mouth referral, believed that they had entered the inner circle of a money-making genius, and some were wary of removing their money from his fund, in case they could not get back in. In later years, even as Madoff's operation accepted money from various countries through feeder funds, he continued to package it as an exclusive opportunity. People who met him in person were impressed with his apparent humility despite his reported financial success and personal wealth.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: The "New York Post" reported that Madoff "worked the so-called 'Jewish circuit' of well-heeled Jews he met at country clubs on Long Island and in Palm Beach." The scandal so affected Palm Beach that, according to "The Globe and Mail", residents "stopped talking about the local destruction the Madoff storm caused only when Hurricane Trump came along" in 2016. "The New York Times" reported that Madoff courted many prominent Jewish executives and organizations and, according to the Associated Press, they "trusted [Madoff] because he is Jewish." One of the most prominent promoters was J. Ezra Merkin, whose fund Ascot Partners steered $1.8 billion towards Madoff's firm. A scheme that targets members of a particular religious or ethnic community is a type of affinity fraud, and a "Newsweek" article identified Madoff's scheme as "an affinity Ponzi."


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Madoff's "unusually consistent" annual returns of around 10% were a key factor in perpetuating the fraud. Ponzi schemes typically pay returns of 20% or higher and collapse quickly. One Madoff fund, which described its "strategy" as focusing on shares in the Standard & Poor's 100-stock index, reported a 10.5% annual return during the previous 17 years. Even at the end of November 2008, amid a general market collapse, the same fund reported that it was up 5.6%, while the same year-to-date total return on the S&P 500-stock index had been negative 38%. An unnamed investor remarked, "The returns were just amazing, and we trusted this guy for decades — if you wanted to take money out, you always got your check in a few days. That's why we were all so stunned."


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: The Swiss bank Union Bancaire Privée explained that because of Madoff's huge volume as a broker-dealer, the bank believed he had a perceived edge on the market because his trades were timed well, suggesting they believed he was front running.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: The Madoff family gained unusual access to Washington's lawmakers and regulators through the industry's top trade group. The Madoff family maintained long-standing, high-level ties to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), the primary securities industry organization.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Bernard Madoff sat on the board of directors of the Securities Industry Association, which merged with the Bond Market Association in 2006 to form SIFMA. Madoff's brother Peter subsequently spent two terms on SIFMA's board. From 2000–2008, the brothers donated $56,000 to SIFMA, and also spent tens of thousands to sponsor SIFMA industry meetings. Peter resigned from the board in December 2008 as the Madoff scandal began to come to light and scrutiny of the brothers' relationship with SIFMA and regulators increased.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: In addition, Bernard Madoff's niece Shana Madoff who was the compliance officer and attorney at Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities from 1995 until 2008, was active on the Executive Committee of SIFMA's Compliance & Legal Division, but resigned her SIFMA position shortly after her uncle's arrest. She in 2007 married former assistant director of the SEC's Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations Eric Swanson, whom she had met in April 2003 while he was investigating her uncle Bernie Madoff and his firm. The two had periodic contact thereafter in connection with Swanson speaking at industry events organized by a SIFMA committee on which Shana Madoff sat. During 2003 Swanson sent Shana's father Peter Madoff two regulatory requests. In March 2004, SEC lawyer Genevievette Walker-Lightfoot, who was reviewing Madoff's firm, raised questions to Swanson (Walker-Lightfoot's boss's supervisor) about unusual trading at a Bernie Madoff fund; Walker-Lightfoot was told to instead concentrate on an unrelated matter. Swanson and Walker-Lightfoot's boss asked for her research, but did not act upon it. In February 2006, Swanson was emailed by Assistant Director John Nee that the SEC’s New York Regional Office was investigating a complaint that Bernard Madoff might be running “the biggest Ponzi scheme ever.”


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: In April 2006, Swanson began to date Shana Madoff. Swanson reported the relationship to his supervisor who wrote in an email "I guess we won't be investigating Madoff anytime soon." On 15 September 2006, Swanson left the SEC. On December 8, 2006, Swanson and Shana Madoff became engaged. In 2007 the two married. A spokesman for Swanson said he "did not participate in any inquiry of Bernard Madoff Securities or its affiliates while involved in a relationship" with Shana Madoff.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Madoff Securities LLC was investigated at least eight times over a 16-year period by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and other regulatory authorities.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: In 1992, the SEC investigated one of Madoff's feeder funds, Avellino & Bienes, the principals being Frank Avellino, Michael Bienes, and his wife Dianne Bienes. Bienes began his career working as an accountant for Madoff's father-in-law, Saul Alpern. Then, he became a partner in the accounting firm Alpern, Avellino and Bienes. In 1962, the firm began advising its clients about investing all of their money with a mystery man, a highly successful and controversial figure on Wall Street—but until this episode, not known as an ace money manager—Madoff. When Alpern retired at the end of 1974, the firm became Avellino and Bienes and continued to invest solely with Madoff.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Avellino & Bienes, represented by Ira Sorkin, Madoff's former attorney, were accused of selling unregistered securities. In a report to the SEC they mentioned the fund's "curiously steady" yearly returns to investors of 13.5% to 20%. However, the SEC did not look any more deeply into the matter, and never publicly referred to Madoff. Through Sorkin, who once oversaw the SEC's New York office, Avellino & Bienes agreed to return the money to investors, shut down their firm, undergo an audit, and pay a fine of $350,000. Avellino complained to the presiding federal judge, John E. Sprizzo, that Price Waterhouse fees were excessive, but the judge ordered him to pay the bill of $428,679 in full. Madoff said that he did not realize the feeder fund was operating illegally, and that his own investment returns tracked the previous 10 years of the S&P 500. The SEC investigation came right in the middle of Madoff's three terms as the chairman of the NASDAQ stock market board.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: The size of the pools mushroomed by word-of-mouth, and investors grew to 3,200 in nine accounts with Madoff. Regulators feared it all might be just a huge scam. "We went into this thinking it could be a major catastrophe. They took in nearly a half a billion dollars in investor money, totally outside the system that we can monitor and regulate. That's pretty frightening," said Richard Walker, who at the time was the SEC's New York regional administrator.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Avellino and Bienes deposited $454 million of investors' money with Madoff, and until 2007, Bienes continued to invest several million dollars of his own money with Madoff. In a 2009 interview after the scam had been exposed, he said, "Doubt Bernie Madoff? Doubt Bernie? No. You doubt God. You can doubt God, but you don't doubt Bernie. He had that aura about him."


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: The SEC investigated Madoff in 1999 and 2000 about concerns that the firm was hiding its customers' orders from other traders, for which Madoff then took corrective measures. In 2001, an SEC official met with Harry Markopolos at their Boston regional office and reviewed his allegations of Madoff's fraudulent practices. The SEC said it conducted two other inquiries into Madoff in the last several years, but did not find any violations or major issues of concern.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: In 2004, after published articles appeared accusing the firm of front running, the SEC's Washington office cleared Madoff. The SEC detailed that inspectors had examined Madoff's brokerage operation in 2005, checking for three kinds of violations: the strategy he used for customer accounts; the requirement of brokers to obtain the best possible price for customer orders; and operating as an unregistered investment adviser. Madoff was registered as a broker-dealer, but doing business as an asset manager. "The staff found no evidence of fraud". In September 2005 Madoff agreed to register his business, but the SEC kept its findings confidential. During the 2005 investigation, Meaghan Cheung, a branch head of the SEC's New York's Enforcement Division, was the person responsible for the oversight and blunder, according to Markopolos, who testified on February 4, 2009, at a hearing held by a House Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: In 2007, SEC enforcement completed an investigation they had begun on January 6, 2006, into a Ponzi scheme allegation. This investigation resulted in neither a finding of fraud, nor a referral to the SEC Commissioners for legal action.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: In 2007, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), the industry-run watchdog for brokerage firms, reported without explanation that parts of Madoff's firm had no customers. "At this point in time we are uncertain of the basis for FINRA's conclusion in this regard," SEC staff wrote shortly after Madoff was arrested.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: As a result, the chairman of the SEC, Christopher Cox, stated that an investigation would delve into "all staff contact and relationships with the Madoff family and firm, and their impact, if any, on decisions by staff regarding the firm". A former SEC compliance officer, Eric Swanson, had married Madoff's niece Shana, the Madoff firm compliance attorney.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Outside analysts raised concerns about Madoff's firm for years. Mathematician Edward O. Thorp noted irregularities in 1991. Among other problems, Thorp found evidence Madoff was lying about or exaggerating his activities. While Madoff claimed to have purchased 123 call options for Procter & Gamble stock on April 16, 1991, Thorp later stated "only 20 P&G options in total had changed hands that day."


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Rob Picard of the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), seeking low-volatility investments, was referred to Madoff in 1997 by employees of Tremont Group who were one of Madoff's key "feeder funds". When pressed for details of his investing strategy, Madoff "stuttered" and became evasive. Picard later stated: "right away I realized he either didn't understand it or he wasn't doing what he said he was doing." Suspecting fraud, RBC declined to invest with Madoff and also cut off professional contact with Tremont.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: The next major concern about Madoff's operation was raised in May 2000, when Harry Markopolos, a financial analyst and portfolio manager at Boston options trader Rampart Investment Management, alerted the SEC about his suspicions. A year earlier, Rampart had learned that Access International Advisors, one of its trading partners, had significant investments with Madoff. Markopolos' bosses at Rampart asked him to design a product that could replicate Madoff's returns. However, Markopolos concluded that Madoff's numbers didn't add up. After four hours of trying and failing to replicate Madoff's returns, Markopolos concluded Madoff was a fraud. He told the SEC that based on his analysis of Madoff's returns, it was mathematically impossible for Madoff to deliver them using the strategies he claimed to use. In his view, there were only two ways to explain the figures—either Madoff was front running his order flow, or his wealth management business was a massive Ponzi scheme. This submission, along with three others, passed with no substantive action from the SEC. At the time of Markopolos' initial submission, Madoff managed assets from between $3 billion and $6 billion, which would have made his wealth management business the largest hedge fund in the world even then. The culmination of Markopolos' analysis was his third submission, a detailed 17-page memo entitled "The World's Largest Hedge Fund is a Fraud." He had also approached "The Wall Street Journal" about the existence of the Ponzi scheme in 2005, but its editors decided not to pursue the story. The memo specified 30 "red flags" based on a little over 14 years of Madoff trades. The biggest red flag was that Madoff reported only seven losing months during this time, and those losses were statistically insignificant. This result produced a return stream that rose steadily upward at a nearly-perfect 45-degree angle. Markopolos argued that the markets were far too volatile even under the best of conditions for this to be possible. Later, Markopolos testified before Congress that this was like a baseball player batting .966 for the season, compared to .300 to .400 for elite players, "and no one suspecting a cheat". In part, the memo concluded: "Bernie Madoff is running the world's largest unregistered hedge fund. He's organized this business as a 'hedge fund of funds' privately labeling their own hedge funds which Bernie Madoff secretly runs for them using a split-strike conversion strategy getting paid only trading commissions which are not disclosed. If this is not a regulatory dodge, I do not know what is." Markopolos declared that Madoff's "unsophisticated portfolio management" was either a Ponzi scheme or front running (buying stock for his own account based on knowledge of his clients' orders), and concluded it was most likely a Ponzi scheme. Markopolos later testified to Congress that to deliver 12% annual returns to the investor, Madoff needed to earn an extraordinary 16% gross on a regular basis, so as to distribute a 4% fee to the feeder fund managers, whom Madoff needed to secure new victims, which encouraged the feeder funds to be "willfully blind, and not get too intrusive". Though Markopolos's findings were neglected by regulators he did persuade some professional investors. Joel Tillinghast, a mutual fund manager at Fidelity Investments, had been intrigued by anecdotes of Madoff's steady gains. But after a 2000 meeting with Markopolos he became convinced "nothing in Madoff's ostensible strategy made sense."


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: In 2001, financial journalist Erin Arvedlund wrote an article for "Barron's" entitled "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", questioning Madoff's secrecy and wondering how he obtained such consistent returns. She reported that "Madoff's investors rave about his performance – even though they don't understand how he does it. 'Even knowledgeable people can't really tell you what he's doing,' one very satisfied investor told "Barron's"." The "Barron's" article and one in "MarHedge" by Michael Ocrant suggested Madoff was front-running to achieve his gains. In 2001 Ocrant, editor-in-chief of "MARHedge", wrote he interviewed traders who were incredulous that Madoff had 72 consecutive gaining months, an unlikely possibility. Hedge funds investing with him were not permitted to name him as money manager in their marketing prospectus. When high-volume investors who were considering participation wanted to review Madoff's records for purposes of due diligence, he refused, convincing them of his desire to keep his proprietary strategies confidential.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: By purportedly selling its holdings for cash at the end of each period, Madoff avoided filing disclosures of its holdings with the SEC, an unusual tactic. Madoff rejected any call for an outside audit "for reasons of secrecy", claiming that was the exclusive responsibility of his brother, Peter, the company's chief compliance officer".


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Concerns were also raised that Madoff's auditor of record was Friehling & Horowitz, a two-person accounting firm based in suburban Rockland County that had only one active accountant, David G. Friehling, a close Madoff family friend. Friehling was also an investor in Madoff's fund, which was seen as a blatant conflict of interest. In 2007, hedge fund consultant Aksia LLC advised its clients not to invest with Madoff, saying it was inconceivable that a tiny firm could adequately service such a massive operation.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Typically, hedge funds hold their portfolio at a securities firm (a major bank or brokerage), which acts as the fund's prime broker. This arrangement allows outside investigators to verify the holdings. Madoff's firm was its own broker-dealer, and purported to process all of its trades.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Ironically, Madoff, a pioneer in electronic trading, refused to provide his clients online access to their accounts. He sent out account statements by mail, unlike most hedge funds, which email statements.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Madoff also operated as a broker-dealer, running an asset management division. In 2003, Joe Aaron, a hedge-fund professional, believed the structure suspicious and warned a colleague to avoid investing in the fund, "Why would a good businessman work his magic for pennies on the dollar?" he concluded. Also in 2003, Renaissance Technologies, "arguably the most successful hedge fund in the world", reduced its exposure to Madoff's fund first by 50 percent and eventually completely because of suspicions about the consistency of returns, the fact that Madoff charged very little compared to other hedge funds, and the impossibility of the strategy Madoff claimed to use because options volume had no relation to the amount of money Madoff was said to administer. The options volume implied that Madoff's fund had $750 million, while he was believed to be managing $15 billion. And only if Madoff was assumed to be responsible for all the options traded in the most liquid strike price.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Charles J. Gradante, co-founder of hedge-fund research firm Hennessee Group, observed that Madoff "only had five down months since 1996", and commented on Madoff's investment performance: "You can't go 10 or 15 years with only three or four down months. It's just impossible."


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Clients such as Fairfield Greenwich Group and Union Bancaire Privée said that they had been given an "unusual degree of access" to evaluate and analyze Madoff's funds, and found nothing unusual with his investment portfolio.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: The Central Bank of Ireland failed to spot Madoff's gigantic fraud when he started using Irish funds, and had to supply large amounts of information that should have been enough to enable the Irish regulator to uncover the fraud much earlier than late 2008 when he was finally arrested in New York City.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: The scheme began to unravel in the fall of 2008, when the general market downturn accelerated. Madoff had previously come close to collapse in the second half of 2005 after Bayou Group, a group of hedge funds, was exposed as a Ponzi scheme that used a bogus accounting firm to misrepresent its performance. By November, investors had requested $105 million in redemptions, though Madoff's Chase account had only $13 million. Madoff survived by moving money from his broker-dealer's account into his Ponzi scheme account. Eventually, he drew on $342 million from his broker-dealer's credit lines to keep the Ponzi scheme afloat through 2006. Markopolos wrote that he suspected Madoff was on the brink of insolvency as early as June 2005, when his team learned he was seeking loans from banks. By then, at least two major banks were no longer willing to lend money to their customers to invest it with Madoff.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: In June 2008, Markopolos' team uncovered evidence that Madoff was accepting leveraged money, investing with borrowed funds in an attempt to boost growth. To Markopolos' mind, Madoff was running out of cash and needed to increase his promised returns to keep the scheme going. As it turned out, redemption requests from skittish investors ramped up in the wake of the collapse of Bear Stearns in March 2008. The trickle became a flood when Lehman Brothers was forced into bankruptcy in September, coinciding with the near-collapse of American International Group.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: As the market's decline accelerated, investors tried to withdraw $7 billion from the firm. Unknown to them, however, Madoff had simply deposited his clients' money into his business account at Chase Manhattan Bank, and paid customers out of that account when they requested withdrawals. To pay off those investors, Madoff needed new money from other investors. However, in November, the balance in the account dropped to dangerously low levels. Only $300 million in new money had come in, but customers had withdrawn $320 million. He had barely enough in the account to meet his redemption payroll on November 19. Even with a rush of new investors who believed Madoff was one of the few funds that was still doing well, it still was not enough to keep up with the avalanche of withdrawals.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: In the weeks prior to his arrest, Madoff struggled to keep the scheme afloat. In November 2008, Madoff Securities International (MSIL) in London made two fund transfers to Bernard Madoff Investment Securities of approximately $164 million. MSIL had neither customers nor clients, and there is no evidence that it conducted any trades on behalf of third parties.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Madoff received $250 million around December 1, 2008, from Carl J. Shapiro, a 95-year-old Boston philanthropist and entrepreneur who was one of Madoff's oldest friends and biggest financial backers. On December 5, he accepted $10 million from Martin Rosenman, president of Rosenman Family LLC, who later sought to recover the never-invested $10 million, deposited in a Madoff account at JPMorgan, wired six days before Madoff's arrest. Judge Lifland ruled that Rosenman was "indistinguishable" from any other Madoff client, so there was no basis for giving him special treatment to recover funds. The judge separately declined to dismiss a lawsuit brought by Hadleigh Holdings, which claimed it entrusted $1 million to the Madoff firm three days before his arrest.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Madoff asked others for money in the final weeks before his arrest, including Wall Street financier Kenneth Langone, whose office was sent a 19-page pitch book, purportedly created by the staff at the Fairfield Greenwich Group. Madoff said he was raising money for a new investment vehicle, between $500 million and $1 billion for exclusive clients, was moving quickly on the venture, and wanted an answer by the following week. Langone declined. In November, Fairfield announced the creation of a new feeder fund. However, it was far too little and far too late.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: By the week after Thanksgiving 2008, Madoff knew he was at the end of his tether. The Chase account, which at one point in 2008 had well over $5 billion, was down to only $234 million. With overall bank lending nearly at a standstill, Madoff knew he could not even begin to borrow enough money to meet the outstanding redemption requests. On December 4, he told Frank DiPascali, who oversaw the Ponzi scheme's operation, that he was finished. He directed DiPascali to use the remaining balance in the Chase account to cash out the accounts of relatives and favored investors. On December 9, he told his brother Peter that he was on the brink of collapse.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: The following morning, December 10, he suggested to his sons, Mark and Andrew, that the firm pay out over $170 million in bonuses two months ahead of schedule, from $200 million in assets that the firm still had. According to the complaint, Mark and Andrew, reportedly unaware of the firm's pending insolvency, confronted their father, asking him how the firm could pay bonuses to employees if it could not pay investors. At that point, Madoff asked his sons to follow him to his apartment, where he admitted that he was "finished" and that the asset management arm of the firm was in fact a Ponzi scheme – as he put it, "one big lie." Mark and Andrew then reported him to the authorities.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Madoff intended to take a week to wind up the firm's operations before his sons alerted authorities. Instead, Mark and Andrew immediately called lawyers. When the sons revealed their father's plan to use the remaining money to pay relatives and favored investors, their lawyers put them in touch with federal prosecutors and the SEC. Madoff was arrested the following morning.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Investigators looked for others involved in the scheme, despite Madoff's assertion that he alone was responsible for the large-scale operation. Harry Susman, an attorney representing several clients of the firm, stated that "someone had to create the appearance that there were returns", and further suggested that there must have been a team buying and selling stocks, forging books, and filing reports. James Ratley, president of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners said, "In order for him to have done this by himself, he would have had to have been at work night and day, no vacation and no time off. He would have had to nurture the Ponzi scheme daily. What happened when he was gone? Who handled it when somebody called in while he was on vacation and said, 'I need access to my money'?"


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: "Simply from an administrative perspective, the act of putting together the various account statements, which did show trading activity, has to involve a number of people. You would need office and support personnel, people who actually knew what the market prices were for the securities that were being traded. You would need accountants so that the internal documents reconcile with the documents being sent to customers at least on a superficial basis," said Tom Dewey, a securities lawyer.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Arvenlund wrote there was widespread suspicion of confederates to the fraud within Madoff's inner circle, but the secretive nature of the scheme made investigation difficult.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: The SEC case is "Securities and Exchange Commission v. Madoff", 1:08-cv- 10791, both U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York. The cases against Fairfield Greenwich Group et al. were consolidated as 09-118 in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (Manhattan).


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: While awaiting sentencing, Madoff met with the SEC's Inspector General, H. David Kotz, who was conducting an investigation into how regulators failed to detect the fraud despite numerous red flags. Because of concerns of improper conduct by Inspector General Kotz in conducting the Madoff investigation, Inspector General David C. Williams of the U.S. Postal Service was brought in to conduct an independent outside review of Kotz's actions. The Williams Report questioned Kotz's work on the Madoff investigation, because Kotz was a "very good friend" with Markopolos. Investigators were not able to determine when Kotz and Markopolos became friends. A violation of the ethics rules took place if their friendship was concurrent with Kotz's investigation of Madoff.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Former SEC chairman Harvey Pitt estimated the actual net fraud to be between $10 and $17 billion, because it does not include the fictional returns credited to the Madoff's customer accounts.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: The original criminal complaint estimated that investors lost $50 billion through the scheme, though "The Wall Street Journal" reports "that figure includes the alleged false profits that Mr. Madoff's firm reported to its customers for decades. It is unclear exactly how much investors deposited into the firm." He was originally charged with a single count of securities fraud and faced up to 20 years in prison, and a fine of $5 million if convicted.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Court papers indicate that Madoff's firm had about 4,800 investment client accounts as of November 30, 2008, and issued statements for that month reporting that client accounts held a total balance of about $65 billion, but actually "held only a small fraction" of that balance for clients.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Madoff was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on December 11, 2008, on a criminal charge of securities fraud. According to the criminal complaint, the previous day he had told his sons that his business was "a giant Ponzi scheme". They called a friend for advice, Martin Flumenbaum, a lawyer, who called federal prosecutors and the SEC on their behalf. FBI Agent Theodore Cacioppi made a house call. "We are here to find out if there is an innocent explanation," Cacioppi said quietly. The 70-year-old financier paused, then said: "There is no innocent explanation." He had "paid investors with money that was not there". Madoff was released on the same day of his arrest after posting $10 million bail. Madoff and his wife surrendered their passports, and he was subject to travel restrictions, a 7 p.m. curfew at his co-op, and electronic monitoring as a condition of bail. Although Madoff only had two co-signers for his $10 million bail, his wife and his brother Peter, rather than the four required, a judge allowed him free on bail but ordered him confined to his apartment. Madoff reportedly received death threats that were referred to the FBI, and the SEC referred to fears of "harm or flight" in its request for Madoff to be confined to his Upper East Side apartment. Cameras monitored his apartment's doors, its communication devices sent signals to the FBI, and his wife was required to pay for additional security.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: Apart from 'Bernard L. Madoff' and 'Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC ("BMIS")', the order to freeze all activities also forbade trading from the companies Madoff Securities International Ltd. ("Madoff International") and Madoff Ltd.


title: Madoff investment scandal

text: On January 5, 2009, prosecutors requested that the Court revoke his bail, after Madoff and his wife allegedly violated the court-ordered asset freeze by mailing jewelry worth up to $1 million to relatives, including their sons and Madoff's brother. It was also noted that $173 million in signed checks had been found in Madoff's office desk after he had been arrested. His sons reported the mailings to prosecutors. Up to that point, Madoff was thought to be cooperating with prosecutors. The following week, Judge Ellis refused the government's request to revoke Madoff's bail, but required as a condition of bail that Madoff make an inventory of personal items and that his mail be searched.