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Conn. AG Shuts Down Madoff Jewelry Sale, 'Scam Within a Scam'

By Bruce Carton

Connecticut's Attorney General says he has saved potential purchasers of jewelry, who presumably only wanted the items because they supposedly belonged to Ruth and Bernie Madoff, from buying inauthentic Madoff jewelry. The AG, Richard Blumenthal, announced last week that he had jumped into action to cause an auction company advertising Madoff goods to cancel two auctions. "These so-called Madoff auctions are going, going -- gone," Blumenthal said, claiming that the planned auctions were "unlicensed" and featured "unverified items supposedly related to Bernard Madoff and his Ponzi scam." Blumenthal called the sale of the unverified jewelry a "possible scam inspired by scam." While the auction advertisements emphasized the sale of "personal items belonging to Ruth & Bernie Madoff acquired from the U.S. Marshal Service," Blumenthal said the company had acknowledged that the auctioneer had no information on hand as to which items were previously owned by the Madoffs and which were not. Philip Eliasoph, a professor of art history at Fairfield University who complained to Blumenthal's office about the scheduled auctions, agreed that the auction appeared to be "a scam within a scam." The Connecticut Post quotes Eliasoph as saying, "The whole pretense is, it's coming out of Uncle Bernie's Montauk...

Full post as published by Legal Blog Watch on December 15, 2009 (boomark / email).