U.S. & World

NEW YORK (CBS) ― For over two decades, Eleanor Squillari of Staten Island was Bernie Madoff's secretary, with a view from the inside that only a very few family members had, reports CBS station WCBS-TV in New York City.

"I don't know if I'll ever believe that this is the person I worked with for 25 years and this is what he did," she said.

Squillari told her story to Vanity Fair, co-written with Mark Seal. She said in the days before his arrest, Madoff seems to have planted key personal items deliberately, in his office, for the FBI to discover.

"And he wanted to know if they had been in his briefcase, and I said 'Yes'. And he said then, 'And what about my appointment book?' And I said 'Yes. They had been in it'. And it was then that I realized, those were the things that were happening that were different. Like Bernie never went anywhere without his appointment book, but he was leaving it on his desk," Squillari said.

According to the secretary who spent two months filling the FBI in on details, Madoff wrote entries in his appointment book, even leaving those 100 checks for $173 million, she said, as his last great performance or con job.

"I realized that Bernie had staged the whole thing. He was planning to take the fall alone," she said. "Bernie was a creature of habit."

"Bernie had a roving eye, and I knew he had a habit of getting frequent massages. One day I caught him scouting the escort pages," she said.
In the article, Squillari said her married former boss was flirtatious and made sexually suggestive remarks. She said she once saw him perusing the escort ads in the back of a magazine and said he frequented massage parlors.

"Once, I looked in his address book and found, under M, about a dozen phone numbers for his masseuses," she wrote. "If you ever lose your address book and somebody finds it, they're going to think you're a pervert, I said."

Squillari said Madoff often made sexually suggestive remarks.

"'Oh, you know you're crazy about me,' he would say to me. Sometimes when he came out of his bathroom, which was diagonal to my desk, he would still be zipping up his pants. If he saw me shaking my head disapprovingly, he would say 'Oh, you know it excites you,'" she wrote.

But Squillari said on a television morning show she had a nice relationship with Madoff, despite his ways toward women.

"So, what one person might perceive as inappropriate, I didn't," Squillari said. "So, if he made suggestive remarks, I knew it was only meant to be funny."

And then, of course, there is Ruth Madoff. Squillari could not understand why she stayed around.

"If that happened to me, I would leave my husband, and go straight to my children. And I find it totally baffling that she didn't do that," she said.

In the article she quotes Madoff saying about his wife, "That's why I've always had Ruth watching the books. Nothing gets by Ruth."

And perhaps the most telling quote concerns when Madoff learned a client's secretary had embezzled. He told Squillari: "Well, you know what happens is, it starts out with you taking a little bit, maybe a few hundred, a few thousand. You get comfortable with that, and before you know it, it snowballs into something big."

Squillari told The Associated Press she thinks her former boss carefully orchestrated his arrest and that he's protecting others who might have been involved in his multibillion-dollar scheme by not cooperating with investigators. She declined to speculate as to whom he might be protecting.

Squillari said that if she had a chance to speak to Madoff, she would ask him "to do the right thing and to let us know this happened."

"I just can't imagine why he's not cooperating, why he's saying he did it himself," she said. "It's not humanly possible, in my opinion."

Squillari wrote about a conversation she had with Madoff years ago, after a client's secretary had been arrested for embezzlement.

"You know, (he) has to take some responsibility for this," Madoff said, according to Squillari. "He should have been keeping an eye on his personal finances."

She wrote that Madoff said he always had his wife, Ruth, watch the books and that "nothing gets by Ruth."

Squillari said she was surprised when he added: "Well, you know what happens is, it starts out with you taking a little bit, maybe a few hundred, a few thousand. You get comfortable with that, and before you know it, it snowballs into something big."

Madoff, 70, pleaded guilty in March to charges that his secretive investment advisory operation was a multibillion-dollar fraud. The former Nasdaq chairman faces up to 150 years in prison.

Madoff's attorney, Ira Sorkin, said Wednesday he has no comment on any of the secretary's allegations.

Squillari said the Madoff who was arrested was not the same man she knew. She said she was shocked and then angry after his arrest.

"I'm having a hard time getting past the person that I did know, who was so kind and generous, and I admired him," she told NBC. "I can't seem to get it in my head that he did this. It's like it's somebody else."

And she decided to help the FBI.

"I was so incredibly angry, and the only way I could work through it was to try to help," she told the AP. "And even though I didn't think I had much to contribute, I felt that whatever I could do might be helpful, and I just kept researching through all of my files and my calendars going back and I started to realize that I was feeling better."

Squillari said Madoff was preoccupied in the weeks before his arrest, and his health deteriorated.

"Bernie was developing high blood pressure," she said. "He was taking medication. He was having a lot of back pain. ... He would have to lie on the floor to give himself relief."

When the arrest became public, Squillari and a co-worker took turns fielding calls from distraught investors.

"You couldn't do it for more than 15, 20 minutes at a stretch," she said. "The people were so devastated, they were so scared, they were crying. ... You didn't know what to tell them. There was no information to give. It was very frustrating, and it made you feel sick."

Squillari said she invested years ago but pulled her money out in the 1990s because as a single mother with two children and a "very limited income," she needed to supplement her earnings.

(© 2010 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

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