Bernie Madoff was a sexist egomaniac, says secretary

The disgraced Wall Street fund manager Bernie Madoff, whose massive investment scam cost thousands of investors their life savings, was a sexist egomaniac who frequented massage parlours and insulted his staff, his former secretary has told Vanity Fair magazine. And she is convinced he refused to co-operate with investigators in order to protect others involved in the fraud.

Eleanor Squillari, who served Madoff for 25 years while he quietly oversaw the world's biggest known investment swindle, described him as a Jekyll & Hyde character whose behaviour deteriorated as the stress mounted in the final days. By the time his fraud came to light last December, he was a physical wreck.

As well as spilling the beans to Vanity Fair, Squillari, a mother-of-two from Staten Island, has been giving TV interviews about her flirtatious boss. "Sometimes when he came out of his bathroom, which was diagonal to my desk," she said, "he would still be zipping up his pants. If he saw me shaking my head disapprovingly, he'd say 'Oh, you know it excites you'."

Squillari said she once caught him perusing the escort advertisements in the back of a magazine. "I looked in his address book and found under M about a dozen phone numbers for his masseuses," she said. It then become clear that Madoff was going for massages in the middle of the day; he always returned to the office "in a better mood".

She also spoke about the role of her boss's wife, Ruth Madoff, who had to keep an "eagle eye on him, especially when he was around young, attractive women". Ruth, she said, maintained an office at the headquarters of Bernard L Madoff Investment Securities (BLMIS), and balanced the cheque books right up until Madoff¹s arrest on December 11.

Squillari refused to be drawn on who Madoff might be protecting. As well as Ruth, his brother, two of his sons and a niece also worked for him, and none has been charged with wrongdoing.

Ruth Madoff, however, is having to fight a legal battle to keep up to $100 million worth of assets which the FBI wants seized. Madoff, who pleaded guilty in March to the $65bn fraud, will finally be sentenced on June 16.