Madoff's secretary talks

Eleanor Squillari spills a few more beans in a 9,000-word article in the June issue of Vanity Fair (co-penned with VF's Mark Seal). Squillari, who was with Madoff for 25 years, spent two months helping the FBI gather evidence. The piece is not yet online, but there is a video with Seal interviewing Squillari. Also, a few tidbits:

• The way Madoff handled stress was "by saying something nasty: You look terrible. You're gaining weight. You're stupid. I never took anything he said to me personally, because I knew it wasn't about me, it was about him."

• Madoff's behavior changed drastically in the weeks before his arrest. "He seems to be in a coma," Squillari told people who walked by his office and saw him staring off into space. He began taking his blood-pressure every 15 minutes, refused to look at his mail, and was constantly meeting with the heads of his feeder funds and Frank DiPascali, "the go-to guy for the investment-advisory business" (the vehicle for Madoff's Ponzi scheme).

• "Bernie was irresistible to women" and "had a roving eye." Squillari once caught him perusing the escort ads in the back of a magazine, and he frequently visited massage parlors. "Once, I looked in his address book and found, under M, about a dozen phone numbers for his masseuses. 'If you ever lose your address book and somebody finds it, they're going to think you're a pervert,' I said."

• Bernie's wife, Ruth, "wanted to be perfect for him. She would never allow herself to gain weight or have a hair out of place, and she always kept an eagle eye on him, especially when he was around young, attractive women." However, "if Bernie said something to Ruth that annoyed her, she'd say, 'Go fuck yourself,' or 'I don't give a shit.' That's the way they talked to each other."

Meanwhile, new court papers allege that Madoff used tens of millions of dollars in client funds to cover costs for employees and family members. From Bloomberg:

Madoff Securities used $4.5 million in client money to satisfy capital calls on behalf of wife Ruth to funds in which she invested; paid $11.5 million for two yachts his family used; and sent $4.4 million to law firms on behalf of Andrew Madoff and another $6.4 million to law firms on behalf of Mark Madoff, the filing says. Money for his children were used for real- estate purchases, the filing says.