Bernie Madoff's Client List is Made Public

The most famous list since Schindler's, the list of clients associated with investor Bernie Madoff's firm, has been made public. It consists of over thirteen thousand names compiled on 163 pages of single-spaced text.

It's posted for download in several places, but usually in PDF format. An easier to read plain text version can be downloaded here.

Not every individual or firm named necessarily invested. The list may be only a mailing list that includes names of everyone who requested a prospectus. Skimming it requires some adjustment. It's alphabetical, but by the client's first, not last, name. It's still an Internet white pages junkie's dream.

Former Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher and Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax is indeed, on it, in the F pages under For Account Of. The Great Neck NY address given is that of Sterling Equities, an investment firm whose own client list includes many Wilpon family members.

The Wilpons' most well-known company, the New York Mets, appears as both Mets Limited Partnership and Sterling-Doubleday Enterprises. As if elimination from baseball post-season play in successive years on the schedule's final day wasn't punishment enough.

Several labor unions are among the organizations whose invested pension funds Bernie's Ponzi scheme wiped out. Among the charities that trusted Bernie, The Elie Weisel Foundation For Humanities lost over $15 million.

Bond girl Barbara Bach is on the list. Phyllis George, Miss America of 1971, who married the governor of Kentucky, is represented by a Lexington KY post office box. Numerous Madoffs appear; several with the same Third Avenue address, maybe that of the luxury co-op where Bernie remains under house arrest?

Among the A names appears Alexandra Penney, author of "How To Make Love To A Man" and former editor of Self magazine. Even before the list became public, newspaper articles revealed that she had lost her life savings in the Madoff scam. How unfortunate, the New York Post reported, that she may have to sell her second home in Florida, let the maid go, and re-learn the New York City subway system.

There are investors as small as a single supermarket in Forest Hills, Queens, and as large as the Rothschild trust based offshore in the Channel Islands. As large as Access International Advisors, the Paris firm managed by René-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, who committed suicide soon after the story broke. M. Magon de la Villehuchet isn't named, but his partner Patrick Lettaye is.

Many people are understandably uneasy over having their names and home addresses published on the Internet, on a list of presumably wealthy folks.

That makes it "the best prospecting list ever," according to Colorado investor Ken Phillips, who was quoted in the February 6, 2009 Wall Street Journal. "You've got the names and addresses of a whole bunch of rich people who don't demand much accountability."

In the same Journal article, New York City attorney Gary Pillersdorf noted that some lawyers may use it to find new clients. "Lawyers all went to law school, they're not dumb," he said. "That list connotes people who have a lot of money."

The voyeuristic nature of the Internet also means the curious have discovered the list. So many that Las Vegas publisher John Linsk has converted it to a searchable database. He proudly advertises it as "the first and only Bernie Madoff search engine."

A by-name search reveals almost two pages of Judiths, many accounts in the name of Bernie Madoff's lawyer, Ira Sorkin, but only one Schindler.