JoAnn Crupi, a former portfolio manager under disgraced hedge fund manager Bernard Madoff, received a six-year prison sentence for her role in Madoff’s multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme, according to Reuters.
Crupi is the last of five former Madoff aides to be sentenced in the past week. In March, the group was convicted on multiple counts of conspiracy and fraud in March for their roles falsifying documents and backdating stock trades as part of the massive Madoff fraud discovered in 2008.
Their conviction followed what was the first and only criminal trial brought to court in connection with the massive Ponzi scheme. Investors lost more than $17 billion in principal, although the victims fund has since recouped nearly $10.5 billion.
Others charged in the wake of the fraud including Bernie Madoff, the fraud’s mastermind, pleaded guilty or cooperated with the government. Madoff was arrested in 2008, and began serving a 150-year sentence after pleading guilty a year later.
Meanwhile, criminal trials involving overseas banks with connections to Madoff are starting in Europe.
Prosecutors had been seeking a sentence of at least 14 years for Crupi, who participated in the creation of false trading data that was shown to Madoff’s clients. A New York federal judge said on Monday that Crupi “was compliant with everything and questioned little” with regard to the Ponzi scheme, Reuters reported.
Former Madoff operations director Daniel Bonventre received a 10-year sentence last week from the same New York federal judge who handled the cases of Crupi and the rest of the ex-aides. The others sentenced last week were former Madoff assistant Annette Bongiorno, who also received a six-year term, while former computer programmers Jerome O’Hara and George Perez each received 2 1/2-year sentences.
Prosecutors sought sentences of more than 20 years each for both Bonventre and Bongiorno, as well as more than eight years each for O’Hara and Perez.