“With Bernie I always felt wanted, desired, and that was an empowering sensation”, Weinstein gushes about her affair with Madoff, which started in 1993 and lasted for a few months. They met when she invested some money given to her organisation Hadassah on the condition that it was invested with Madoff; meeting Madoff made her feel “heat prickle my face”. Are you sure that wasn’t the sense of impending financial ruin?

They met up in hotels and “we’d spend three or four hours talking, eating, and making love…When we made love, I was on fire”. Madoff, you tiger! But wait: “Bernie had a very small penis. Not only was it on the short side, it was small in circumference. It clearly caused him great angst”. But before everyone starts spouting some Freud For Dummies cod psychology about him extorting people as a way to compensate for his manhood, Bernie knew that what he did with it was what counts: “His tiny penis hadn’t prevented me from climaxing”.

Other details include Bernie being on attention-deficit disorder drugs and maybe having Tourette’s, being a bad tipper, “vodka-fuelled massages” (?!), and the fact that Weinstein smoked weed, which Bernie said that his wife Ruth did too.

After a few months, that annoying affair-guilt kicked in, and they both realised they were married and that it couldn’t continue (not before Bernie told Sheryl he loved her though). They stayed friends, and Bernie was still Weinstein’s main money man. She ended up losing her family’s life savings through him, and was there on the front line during his trial, testifying against him, cheering when he went down, and branding him a “monster”. Don’t expect them to be kissing through the visiting-window glass any time soon.

Hadassah though actually cashed in a fair amount of profit from its Madoff investments before the scheme collapsed, about $120m-worth, meaning that Irving Picard and his team of guys desperately trying to find Madoff money anywhere from the vending machines in his offices to the lost city of Atlantis may try and swoop in to redistribute some of that cash.

Anything that describes itself as a “Zionist” organisation makes me a little uncomfortable. But taking their profits off them is nevertheless a very contentious move – how can you quantify the worth of a person’s savings over the work of a charitable organisation? Expect the Madoff compensation circus to get a lot nastier than some small-penis jibes.

This being China, the news has taken nearly two years to start trickling out, with details of the court case begun last week making it into the FT this morning. One of the chairmen of developer Canton Properties, Wang Sheng, is accused of taking loans out in the company’s name from state-and-HSBC-owned Bank of Communications, and keeping them for himself. The president of the bank who allowed the loans has been on the run since the investigation was started in late 2007, making the attempts of his recent fraudulent peers in the States look very weak indeed. It’s in his interest to keep running – China’s state news agency reports today that the state has just executed two major fraudsters.

They’re not the only ones committing everyone’s favourite white collar crime though – check out these bozos from this week’s press: 

- First up is Edward Okun, who has been sentenced this week for running a fraud in which he used money given to him to invest in banks as pocket money for nice things like the divorce from his old wife and jewelry for his new one. He also bought his chums shots of cognac for $1,008 each during a holiday in the Bahamas, about which the restaurant owners still laugh now. In the overkill that saw Madoff get 150 years in jail, Okun was recommended 400 years – in the end he got off lightly with just 100.

- “Magician Paul Daniels helped his son escape jail today after he admitted stealing £10,000 from the NHS” is the opening paragraph in a Sun story today, but as is the case so often with the tabloids, they ruthlessly pique your interest only to disappoint you a paragraph later. Rather than performing some kind of disappearing trick involving glittery capes and awkward banter, Daniels actually just pleaded with the court to let his son off a fraud conviction.

- Ruth Madoff now has to announce any expenditures over $100, which when you’ve been living in a Manhattan penthouse is usually most of them. This constant inconvenience is compounded by exactly the wrong sort of Vanity Fair feature she would want – an in-depth analysis of her history and character by Mark Seal, who has been profiling the Madoffs for the mag and who Ruth apparently hates. It’s all here – the rudeness, the loud voice, the botched surgery. The pre-feminist who books belly-dancers for office parties, the hot-tempered and foul-mouthed party pooper, the “robot” addicted to normality, the MILF, the “fucking social climber”, the woman who was “sort of artificial and frozen—her face, her home.” Ruth claims that many of the depictions of her are inaccurate, but even if you ignore them all the crucial spectre still hangs over her, and it does throughout the article – that she couldn’t have possibly been unaware of the fraud.

Irving “Captain” Picard is the man whose job it is to scrabble around the metaphorical back of Bernie’s sofa to try and find some money to give back – so far he’s found $1bn, so now just has $64bn to go. His next target is Ruth, who he claims, despite her giving back all but $2.5m in assets last month, should pony up $44.8m. He cited the “inequity between Mrs Madoff’s continuing financial advantages and the economic distress of Madoff’s customers”. Hey! This is the woman last seen clipping coupons so she can get a cheap salad for lunch! Not really sure how the maths on this one is going to add up – she’s given back nearly everything she can. Plus the basis of the case on the premise that Ruth had “no good faith basis to believe she was entitled ” to the money her husband was making is shaky at best, considering that in the eyes of the law she wasn’t aware of the fraud. 

In other Madoff ephemera, we get a little glimpse into the rarified, bitchy stratum that Manhattan luxury real estate brokers live in in the New York Observer. Listing the Madoff penthouse is obviously a big prize, but they weren’t happy about the way the selection process was conducted – they all had to wander round it together to check it out, rather than get an individual vetting. “It was a strange and, frankly, slightly insulting way to handle it”, one said. It sounds simply beastly! Put next to the kiddie charities that were left penniless though, and I’m sure the perspective will come raining through. And check this bit of finger-snapping bitchiness from one broker about the state of the place: “So not triple-mint”. Yes, they’re dealing in apartments so plush that just one or two “mints” won’t do.

Madoff himself meanwhile is adapting to prison life well enough – it sounds like he’s been doing some serious reps! “He looked pretty good and seems to be working out.. he looked a lot better than he has in some months since I’ve seen photographs of him”, said Joseph Cotchett, an attorney representing Madoff’s victims who met him in jail. Just can’t shake that image of Madoff doing chin-ups surrounded by respectfully nodding tattooed gang lords. Cotchett also said Madoff, while trying to protect Ruth from the aforementioned nastiness, “doesn’t give a shit” about his sons. Maybe Picard should turn his focus thataway.

Things started to look up for Ruth a couple of weeks ago, when it emerged that a trust originally formed by her late parents was being “looked after” by Bernie; the feds realised that she wouldn’t put her own money into a fraudulent scheme. She’ll be still watching her back though – the WSJ notes: “the agreement didn’t preclude future criminal charges or lawsuits by the Securities and Exchange Commission or attorney Irving Picard, the trustee of the defunct Madoff firm who is recovering assets for investors”. No doubt some wronged investors will try and come after her last $2.5m. Plus there’s the slightly damaging fact that she shifted millions from one account to another, and had jewellery sent to relatives, just before the news broke.

Those who lost money to Madoff can take heart from the news that $231m has so far been freed up to pay them back – under U.S. law, each victim can receive up to $500,000 from the Securities Investor Protection Corporation. Of course, this falls rather short of the nearly $3bn-worth of complaints filed resulting from the fraud; an additional $2.7bn has been “authorized for potential future recovery”, but that’s only going to materialise if Madoff’s assets can be somehow discovered and mopped up.

We’ll have to wait and see if Madoff’s sons get off as lightly as their mother – they’ve had some actual lawsuits filed against them for a start, and were employees of their father. They did call the FBI though when their pops tearfully confessed that everything was a sham; depending on your love of conspiracy theories, you could surmise that Bernie orchestrated his demise thus so as to make his sons appear innocent. Or, y’know, they could just be innocent. Let’s let the Feds decide.

Still, it sends the message that this was a Very Bad Thing that Madoff did, and there were cheers in the courtroom from wronged investors. They were given the opportunity before the sentencing to testify, and did so rather luridly. “He walks among us. He dresses like us … but underneath the facade is a true beast. He has fed upon us”, said Sheryl Weinstein with full Old Testament bombast; “He discarded me like roadkill”, mused Miriam Siegman, who has apparently taken to scavenging in dumpsters for food post-fraud; Burt Ross meanwhile unselfconsciously quoted Dante, and said afterwards: “I told the judge that when Bernard Madoff leaves prison, which means after his death, that he will then go down to the depths of hell where he’ll join those other people who are in the mouths of Satan”. Most informative.

Bernie’s wife Ruth Madoff, she of the extremely on-trend circular-rimmed glasses, also spoke up yesterday. She’s predictably a bit gutted about the whole thing: “Like everyone else, I feel betrayed and confused. The man who committed this horrible fraud is not the man whom I have known for all these years.” She’s giving up $80m in assets, including boats and two houses, and will be left with $2.5m cash. New York Daily News has a look inside the apartment she’s having to give up: “Madoff’s bedroom boasts of a burlwood chest topped with Chinese porcelains dating back to the late 1700s”. That Madoff’s bedroom, always showing off! Though as CBS notes, she might not be out of the woods yet – some of that $2.5m may still be open to claims by the Securities and Exchange Commission investigating the fraud.

So while Madoff goes back to his reading and keep-fit routine, the legal world is reeling from the sentencing. “What benefit did this guy get for pleading guilty?”, wonders lawyer Christopher Clark over at the WSJ. Others suggest the big sentence was because Madoff didn’t play ball in the plea-bargaining stage, shouldering all the responsibility himself. As the FBI has had to send their boys to Europe in an attempt to find out who else could be involved, such evasiveness from Madoff hasn’t gone down well. But seeing as the sentence he was pushing for was 12 years, he wasn’t going to particularly benefit from spilling the beans anyway.

It looks like the only ones to really benefit from yesterday were the enterprising folks hawking Madoff merchandise. “A man with statue of a caged bear and a name tag reading ‘Bernard Madoff’ hanging from its neck sat on a cart outside the courthouse”, according to the New York Times, while artists sketched pictures of Madoff to sell to passers-by – are they really going to be as awesome as these official courtroom sketches though?

Most exciting though was the NY Times spotting Michael Imperioli, of Christopher Moltisanti and getting-blasted-by-Joe-Pesci-in-Goodfellas fame, hanging around outside the courtroom “conducting research for a forthcoming project”! The Madoff miniseries starts here! Hopefully with guns!

It’s surprising that it’s taken this long, considering lawsuits have been brought against other people close to Madoff, like Ezra Merkin, as well as other channellers of people’s money, like Fairfield Greenwich. But none get as close as Cohmad, who operated in the next office to Madoff and was partly owned by him. Maurice and Marcia Cohn, the father and daughter team who ran the company, were either very stupid, or very willing to look the other way. Robert Jaffe, who ran Cohmad’s Boston operation, has had the writing on the wall for some time – you may remember he was almost lynched by a gang of irate Floridian Jews just after the Madoff story broke, and had to be rescued by Donald Trump.

Also getting a civil suit filed against them is Stanley Chais, who looks like Magnum PI leading Friday prayers – he’s another guy who fed funds of others into Madoff’s coffers, bagging $546m in profits and $270m in fees. Like the Cohn’s, he’s either thick or involved – Madoff didn’t report a single loss during thousands of stock trades using Chais’s investments, of which Chais either thought “Wow, what a clever man!” or “I don’t care, just as long as I’m getting paid”. While Chais’s attorney said that he lost “virtually everything” to Madoff, the SEC claim that the whole thing was profitable for him. Chais’s clients include Eric Roth, who wrote films like Ali, Forrest Gump and, er, The Postman. Did someone say “karma”?

Give it some time, but we can expect criminal proceedings to be brought against some of these folks at some point. The feds are currently leaning on Frank DiPascali, Madoff’s “ninja” deputy, to extract names and information about the operation, before swinging in and rounding everyone up. Piecing together the evidence is turning into a massive ballache, what with some of the records needing to be digitised from microfilm. Madoff’s propensity for filing non-electronic records can’t be helping either.

Meanwhile the Madoff sentencing season is beginning in earnest – check this pretty-hard-to-stomach interview by Fox News with Claudine de la Villehuchet, widow of Rene, who killed himself after realising he’d lost millions of dollars of others people’s money by investing it with Madoff. She describes Madoff as a “psychopath” and a “murderer”. Those who enjoy nauseating invasions of people’s emotional privacy by interviewers acting like cut-price psychotherapists will find much to like.

Fairfield Greenwich was a fund-of-funds business, or “feeder fund”, which means that they invested clients’ money across a range of different funds; they acted as a medium between investors and individual hedge funds, feeding money to those funds, and taking a commission for doing so. If you plot a line of “honest hard work”, with doctor, fireman, aid worker etc at one end, then feeder-fund manager is about as far down the other end as you can get.

Unfortunately for their investors, Fairfield Greenwich was investing their money with Madoff, who was giving Fairfield handsome rewards for providing him with the much needed capital to keep his Ponzi scheme paying out. Fairfield presumably didn’t care to investigate Madoff’s funds too deeply; the money was rolling in, and that’s what counted. Their website describes one range of investments as being ”selected and managed with the same level of care and professionalism as all FGG products”, which sounds a little hollow now. About half of its $14bn-worth of assets under management were in Madoff funds.

Regulators from the state of Massachusetts, where Fairfield Greenwich is based, weren’t impressed with them for channelling so much money to Madoff, and accused them of fraud, citing a lack of “fiduciary responsibility to their clients”. Fairfield responded: “Nothing more than 20-20 hindsight that supposes that anyone familiar with Madoff’s operations should have determined that it was a Ponzi scheme”, later saying “The complaint here was rushed into existence and is so filled with errors and factual distortions as to completely misstate the conduct of the companies that make up the Fairfield Greenwich Group”. There are also various other lawsuits being made against the group from individual investors, and last week they also contested a range of statements made about them in a TV documentary about the Madoff case.

To be fair, they’re on pretty strong ground. If the America’s financial services regulators the SEC didn’t notice, then maybe they had no reason to suspect anything; Madoff did pay out $3bn to Fairfield funds over 18 years. They’re also arguing that Madoff gave them false data about his investments. But Jeffrey Tucker, one of the firm’s founders, knew that Madoff’s accountancy firm was just one man, despite also saying that the accountants were responsible for hundreds of clients. Fairfield were too blinded by the returns – $100m a year in fees – to bother questioning curveballs like this too deeply.

The scandal dragged the Fairfield Greenwich brand into the mud, hence the sell-off. It’s an ignominious end for 78-year-old founder Walter Noel, whose identikit socialite family looks like the product of a eugenics program sponsored by Piz Buin. Noels daughters are regulars on the New York rich kid scene, and they sound like a delightful bunch – known as the “Aspirina sisters” because of the headaches they gave female classmates after constantly stealing their boyfriends, four of them slept with the same guy one after another, while one of them dated an Italian mafioso while still in her teens. They’ve also been banned from their country club. Read the whole story of the family, including their annoying yapping on tennis courts and “tone-deaf” socialising amid the breaking scandal, in this typically epic and stately Vanity Fair piece; and read a pre-scandal VF piece on them here. The other founder, Jeffrey Tucker, is also hurting from the scandal – he and Noel have had to sell their private jet, and he’s had to sell off his horse farm.

While we hope the rumours that Noel has Alzheimer’s are false, this is a company that we’re not sad to see the back of. Hopefully feeder funds, with their extra level of opacity, will become a thing of the past in the wake of the Madoff scandal and the financial crisis in general.

By sending the money to Madoff, without the permission of the investors, Merkin, former chairman of General Motors’ financing arm GMAC, made around $470m in fees; many of the investors he exploited to get these ill-gotten gains were charities. One of the charitable foundations that lost money thanks to Merkin’s alleged mischief was headed up by Mort Zuckerman, who also filed charges against Merkin yesterday to try and get back the $40m in losses he sustained to the Madoff fraud. 

Zuckerman said that at no point did Merkin tell him “actually, I’m going to give all your money to this Madoff guy. Don’t worry, he knows Kevin Bacon!”; Merkin for his part is saying that he sent Zuckerman a memo highlighting the “lack of diversification” in his investments, which is lacking a certain specificity if you ask me.

Merkin’s lawyer said both lawsuits were “without merit”, saying that all the people who invested with Merkin expressly allowed him to “allocate assets to third-party managers”. Really? They just let him send millions of dollars wherever he thought best? What’s more believable is that Merkin didn’t know it was a Ponzi scheme that he was sending the money to, just as countless other investors and regulators didn’t realise, and his lawyer says as much in his statement.

It comes a week after Fairfield Greenwich, a fund that had fed nearly half of its investments to Madoff, was also served with civil fraud charges for similarly turning a blind eye while taking hefty fees for providing the investments. And also suing Merkin are NYU, who had employed Merkin to invest their money; they ended up losing $24m to Madoff. Merkin has continued his bad karma by not paying the lawyers that defended the fund against the NYU allegations.

Time magazine has an interesting piece from Robert Chew, an investor with a Madoff feeder fund, who holds his hands up and says: we should have been more careful, but the money was just too good. You would think that because the money was so good investors’ bullshit alarms would start sounding, but it goes to show that Madoff’s fraud worked for so long because it was just so ballsy, blinding everyone concerned with unbelievable sums. Poor Chew can’t write for toffee – at one point talking with blithely Brass Eye grandeur of “the cone of secrecy… pulled down tight from day one” – but his honesty is pretty amazing, and makes the important point that without the extra layer of opacity afforded Madoff by the feeder funds, the fraud would never have carried on as long as it did.

And if you want to luxuriate in thousands of words on the intertwined existences of Merkin and Madoff, head over to this New York magazine article. Nice moments include Madoff singing Neil Diamond on a beach in Mexico during his 70th birthday party: “Where it began, I can’t begin to know.”

Friehling is accused of aiding Madoff by conducting “audits” that probably just involved flicking through sheets at high speed and saying “this looks fine”, before heading for lunchtime cocktails. He then didn’t even file the findings of the “pretend” audits. All this doesn’t exactly reflect well on the SEC, the regulators who didn’t spot Madoff’s fraud – if his accountant isn’t even filing audits that were made up in the first place, from an office in a tiny New York town rather than a city-base firm, you might have expected some sort of red flag to come up, but no.

Friehling, whose son recently and rather pathetically covered Fox News’s car in water, had accounts with Madoff reportedly worth $14m. If he pleads not guilty, it means he’s saying that he innocently deposited $14m with Madoff despite having access to his books – so it’s a choice between being guilty or the stupidest person ever. Rock – Friehling – hard place.

But while Friehling is the only person other than Madoff to be charged over the scandal, people are starting to wonder who else might be involved. His quick confession, and assertions that his sons were working on the legit side of the business and that he employed staff that were underqualified so as to avoid suspicion, seem to be trying to prevent anyone else getting implicated. Now his family are retrenching – Ruth Madoff’s official main residence is now this Floridian mansion, in an effort to legally protect it from creditors. She and Peter Madoff, Bernie’s bro, originally applied for the homestead exemption that protects their properties in this way back in 2006, just as the SEC was beginning their investigation of the firm. Ruth also reapplied for the homestead exemption just two months before Bernie’s arrest. Looks like they knew something was up. There’s also debate about exactly when Peter was told about the scheme by Bernie – if it was the day before Bernie told his sons, why didn’t he tell anyone?

Other potential arrestees include Madoff’s “chief financial officer” Frank DiPascali; Alvin Delaire and Marcia Cohn, executives at Madoff’s brokerage firm Cohmad that channelled funds from investors; Robert Jaffe, the head of Madoff’s Boston brokerage firm, who has already nearly got smacked in the chops over the scandal, and probably would have been were it not for the intervention of Donald Trump (bizarre, I know); and Enrica Pitz, the controller of Madoff Investment Securities who signed off a number of Madoff’s cheques. 

Madoff fans can slake their thirst for the scandal at great length in a predictably excellent Vanity Fair piece from this month. Highlights include sugar grand-daddy Norman Levy wooing his broke paramour with $100,000 to invest with Madoff – it’s the gift that keeps on giving! Or not. The aforementioned recipient, Carmen Dell’Orifece, paints Madoff as a sweet humble Queens boy who looked after his friends. ”Madoff in a silly paper hat, his calves showing, lounging on a divan…’This was their idea of fun’”, she says. “Bernie knew about piracy, because he was an oceangoing person”, she says at one point – we also learn he likes Neil Diamond and Diet Coke. This contrasts with what people who dealt with him on a professional basis have to say: obsessive-compulsive, “not someone you would want to have a beer with”.

There’s a bit about the extended Madoff clan, including the daughter-in-law who appeared in a bikini for a fly-fishing mag. And there’s a great description of the sickening panic that set in with investors, culminating in a crazed charity ball – “She said it was like the Titanic going down – people screaming and yelling. She had never seen such emotion…Everybody was drunk – people that don’t drink – like their lives were over.”

eBay store Echo Vintage Books and Vinyl has clearly been thinking outside the box for some fresh revenue streams, and come up with the idea of commemorative tiles decorated with a celeb photo picked out in blotchy black paint, priced at $29.99. I know, but some people will buy any old crap. 

There’s the celebs you might expect – Cruise, Cyrus, Obama – but then there’s some real niche curveballs – Desmond Tutu, short story writer Andre Dubus, Chesly Sullenberger aka that guy who landed that plane in the Hudson river. Chinese politicians and Indian cricketers also feature heavily. And best of all are a few stars of the financial crisis! Crooked senator Rod Blagojevich, chair of House Financial Services Committee Barney Frank, controversy plagued senator Chris Dodd, regulation-hating former Fed chair Alan Greenspan, and record fraudsters Bernie Madoff and Allen Stanford, the former “selling fast” and bumped up to $98, while the latter looks awfully like Hitler.

You can even set up your own ceramic talk-show firebrand face-off, with tiles of Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann! Personally I’m going to be bidding for a tile of Dennis Farina. Nothing says “classy bathroom” like anachronistic C-list Italian comic actors.

Rewind to late 2004, when an armed gang stole £26.5m from Belfast’s Northern Bank. In consummate bungling-burglars fashion, they stole Northern Bank-branded notes, which can only be used in Ireland or Scotland, and could easily be spotted. Northern Bank changed the colour of their banknotes to make it even harder; cue a lot of note-burning and general Guy-Ritchie-movie mayhem.

£2.4m in banknotes was found in a compost bag in Cunningham’s home a month later, which he originally claimed was from the sale of a gravel pit to some Bulgarians (good effort) but then later said in a police interview that the Bulgarian thing was a front to launder the cash. And guess where the £2.4m ended up coming from? Yes, the bank raid. And as Cunningham is saying that he knew the laundered cash was from the raid, and that Phil Flynn was the head of the laundering operation, then it looks like Flynn, a former bank chair, played a major part in the heist, if not in the planning and execution then at least very soon after.

The political implications of the raid were serious, with Bertie Aherne and Northern Irish police both accusing the IRA of masterminding the operation, and the IRA denying it. Cunningham has said that he’s not had any connection with Sinn Fein or the IRA, except for a few brief meetings and some Christmas cards. So if it wasn’t the IRA, then who was it? The trial continues, pass the popcorn.

But these wide boys aren’t the only launderettes today – there’s also Terry Freeman, head of GFX Capital, a company that isn’t shredding any stereotypes about its native Essex any time soon. He controlled a currency trading fund worth £40m; it’s stopped trading, and people haven’t been able to access their funds recently. Sounds awfully like Ponzi to me! Now he’s been arrested, and released on bail, surprising given his apparent propensity to travel abroad and the death threats recently made against him. Good luck out there Tezza!

Meanwhile, the Madoff case, the Ponzi to end all Ponzis, continues to splutter onwards towards indictment and trial at a snail’s pace, while depressing fallout ebbs around the globe. It’s enough to make you put your cash in a 1% saving account and run off to a commune.

75-year-old Nami is the head of L&G, a company that makes bedding and healthcare products, and him and his executives (21 of whom have also been arrested) promised returns of 9% every three months for every 1m yen invested. “Inventor Thomas Edison failed 10,000 times and was accused of being a con man”, was one of his favourite lines to attract wary investors, which is a rather ballsy strategy if you ask me. But to continue Nami’s simile, some must have thought that he’d produce a lightbulb eventually, and at least 37,000 people hopped on board. 

Of course, as the previous quote proves, some bozos will sign up to anything no matter how dubious it sounds, but others will need some convincing. And what’s more convincing that celebrities? Madoff knew it, ensnaring Kevin Bacon in his web of lies and schmoozing at the US Open to lend legitimacy to his operation; Nami put on massive events with big pop stars, thus telling the world that he must be kosher if he could conduct such lavishness. In the very funny words of one conned businesswoman: ”I couldn’t help but trust Nami after seeing with my very own eyes how closely he chatted with the stars.”

Also reeling in the suckers was Enten, Nami’s virtual currency named by blending “yen” with the word for “heaven”, and described with typical snake-oil banter as “money that doesn’t decrease even when you spend it”. You got a wodge of it depending on the size of your investment, and it could be used online to buy mostly L&G-made commodities; Nami said that the currency would become legal tender at some point, adding: “I will start shining and become world famous. I will certainly move the world”. Unfortunately, when the wheels started to fall of the scheme, Nami tried to pay investors just in Enten, which was useless unless you wanted to subsist off bedding and luxury furniture. The company filed for bankruptcy back in 2007, but is suspected of being effectively bankrupt since 2000.

After a couple of weeks of circulating, the police finally swooped on Nami in rather cinematic circumstances yesterday. Having told reporters that he would be having breakfast at his favourite restaurant the following morning, Nami arrived with a suitcase full of spare underwear and clothes in preparation for his fate. He then sat down for makunouchi bento and some beer, with tens of reporters papping him from outside, before going quietly when the fuzz turned up. Nothing says “I’m screwed” like drinking beer at 5.30am with a suitcase full of pants.

Nami gets indicted tomorrow, presumably in a crisply laundered shirt.