Madoff losses spread

The list of victims within Bernard Madoff's investment empire continues to expand. The WSJ reports that real-estate magnate Mort Zuckerman, the foundation of Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, and a charity of Steven Spielberg all stand to lose some serious money from the Madoff operation. Perhaps more critical to the financial markets are the stakes that were being handled by the Spanish bank Grupo Santander and France's BNP Paribas.

The Spielberg charity, the Wunderkinder Foundation, in the past appears to have invested a significant portion of its assets with Mr. Madoff, based on regulatory filings. In 2006, the Madoff firm accounted for roughly 70% of the foundation's interest and dividend income, according to regulatory filings. A representative of Mr. Spielberg confirmed that the foundation has suffered losses on its investments with the Madoff firm. He said he didn't know the size of the losses and couldn't comment further, including on whether Mr. Spielberg had any of his own money invested with the Madoff firm. Jewish schools and charities have been particularly hard hit by losses that government authorities estimated last week at $50 billion.

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In a sign of the pain that investors are feeling, some are rushing to raise cash. In the wealthy Florida enclave of Palm Beach, four multimillion-dollar condos at Two Breakers Row, a peach-colored complex just north of the landmark Breakers hotel, on Friday and Saturday were put up for sale by owners who had invested with Mr. Madoff, said Nadine House, a prominent local real-estate agent.

Meanwhile, Madoff's activities apparently reached into L.A.'s Jewish community. "It has come to our attention that the Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles is included among a number of major institutions that may have been victimized by an alleged fraud," Foundation Board Chair Cathy Siegel Weiss and President and CEO Marvin Schotland wrote in a letter to board members (and posted by the Jewish Journal). "Mr. Madoff was highly regarded and his firm has been one of the most prominent firms on Wall Street for decades. We were shocked to learn of this alleged fraud." The letter says that $18 million of the Foundation's Common Investment Pool (currently valued at 11 percent of its assets) was invested with Madoff.

Also. federal investigators found evidence that Madoff ran an unregistered money-management business alongside his firm’s brokerage and investment-advisory units, according to Bloomberg. Clearly, there's a lot about this that's still unraveling.