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!

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.”