By Gabriela Resto-Montero
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff said banks and hedge funds knew about the fraud he was orchestrating, according to an interview he gave the New York Times Wednesday.
"They had to know," Madoff said of banks and hedge funds that apparently failed to connect the dots and discover his scheme, to the paper.
"But the attitude was sort of, 'If you're doing something wrong, we don't want to know'," Madoff told the Times.
Madoff is currently serving a 150-year prison sentence for swindling $85 billion from investors. Madoff said that he had acted alone at the time of his arrest.
Since his imprisonment, Madoff has collaborated with Irving Picard, a trustee charged with recovering victims' lost assets, the paper reported.
So far, Picard has been able to recover $10 billion for victims, according to the Times.
Picard currently has a lawsuit against the Wilpon family, owners of the Mets, but Madoff said neither Fred Wilpon nor his brother-in-law, Saul Katz, were aware of the scheme.
"They knew nothing. They knew nothing," he told the Times.
Madoff also spoke about the effect of his exposure as a fraud on his family and what he called the "disgraceful" media coverage of his son's suicide in December.
Mark Madoff hanged himself in his SoHo apartment on the second anniversary of his father's arrest. Bernie Madoff said prison authorities would not let him attend the funeral because it would've been a public safety issue, the Times reported.
