Vintage Bernie Madoff, fraudster and kinkster

Lawsuit details Madoff's bottom-bunk prison life
By JENNIFER PELTZ (AP) – 8 hours ago

NEW YORK — Fallen financier Bernard Madoff has plunged from his Manhattan penthouse to the lower bunk of a cell he shares with a drug offender at a federal prison, where he eats pizza cooked by a child molester and hangs around with a mob boss and a convicted spy, according to legal papers filed Tuesday.

The snapshot of Madoff's prison life — and a contrasting picture of a former high-flying life laced with cocaine and salacious parties — are in a legal complaint filed by Burlingame, Calif.-based lawyer Joseph Cotchett, who represents about a dozen victims of Madoff's massive investment Ponzi scheme. Cotchett interviewed Madoff in July at the Butner Federal Correctional Complex near Raleigh, N.C.

The lawyer found the mastermind of one of history's largest financial frauds now reduced to nighttime walks around a prison track for fun, according to the new filing. It builds on one investor's existing civil case against various Madoff associates and financial institutions; the suit claims they were complicit in Madoff's fraud or should have stopped it. Madoff has consistently said he acted alone.

When not rubbing elbows with drug and sex offenders, Madoff spends time with Carmine Persico, a reputed Colombo crime family boss, and Jonathan Pollard, an American convicted of selling military secrets to Israel more than two decades ago, according to the lawsuit.

Madoff's lawyer, Ira Sorkin, declined to discuss his client's prison life or the lawsuit's allegations about shenanigans in his former office. Telephones for spokespeople for the Federal Bureau of Prisons rang unanswered Tuesday night; the agency's records do show Pollard and Persico are housed at Butner.

The lawsuit goes to length to compare Madoff's prison existence with his deluxe former life, including photos of his yacht and homes and claims that he ran an office rife with drug use and sexual escapades.

According to the allegations — their source isn't specified — Madoff deployed an employee and to get drugs from 1975 to 2003, fueling an office so cocaine-laden insiders dubbed it "the North Pole." Office parties featured topless waitresses, employee affairs were common and Madoff kept a list of his favorite pretty masseuses in his personal phone book, the lawsuit said, claiming investors' money helped pay for it all.

"Employees described it as a wild, fast-talking, drug-using office culture," said the complaint. It says its various allegations are based in part on interviews with other unnamed people besides Madoff.

Madoff, 71, is serving a 150-year sentence after pleading guilty in March to a scheme that authorities say cost thousands of investors at least $13 billion.

The lawsuit doesn't detail his talk with Cotchett. The lawyer previously said the one-time Nasdaq market chairman repeatedly apologized for the harm he caused victims.

Exchanging meat for sex. Only for chimps?

Share and share alike: a male chimp will give up his hard-earned catch for sex. He is not alone.


Chimpanzees exchange meat for sex

By Victoria Gill
Science reporter, BBC News


Chimpanzees enter into "deals" whereby they exchange meat for sex, according to researchers.
Male chimps that are willing to share the proceeds of their hunting expeditions mate twice as often as their more selfish counterparts.

This is a long-term exchange, so males continue to share their catch with females when they are not fertile, copulating with them when they are.

The team describe their findings in the journal PLoS One.

Cristina Gomes and her colleagues, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, studied chimps in the Tai Forest reserve in Ivory Coast.

She and her team observed the animals as they hunted, and monitored the number of times they copulated.
"By sharing, the males increase the number of times they mate, and the females increase their intake of calories," said Dr Gomes.

"What's amazing is that if a male shares with a particular female, he doubles the number of times he copulates with her, which is likely to increase the probability of fertilising that female."

High value

Meat is important for the animals' diet because it is so high in protein. Since female chimps do not usually hunt, "they have a hard time getting it on their own," explained Dr Gomes.

One Night Stands

Males might share meat with a female one day, and only copulate with her a day or two later
Cristina Gomes

The "meat for sex hypothesis" had already been proposed to explain why male chimps might share with females.
But previous attempts to record the phenomenon failed, because researchers looked for direct exchanges, where a male shared meat with a fertile female and copulated with her right away.



Dr Gomes' team took a new approach. In a previous study, she had found that grooming exchange - where the animals take it in turns to groom each other - happens over long periods, she related. "So we thought, why not meat and sex?

"We looked at chimps when they were not in oestrus, this means they don't have sexual swellings and aren't copulating."
"The males still share with them - they might share meat with a female one day, and only copulate with her a day or two later."
Dr Gomes thinks that her findings could even provide clues about human evolution.

She suggests this study could lay the foundations for human studies exploring the link between "good hunting skills and reproductive success".

"This has got me really interested in humans," she said. "I'm thinking of moving on to working with hunter-gatherers."
Michael Gurven from the University of California in Santa Barbara studies human behaviour in communities of hunter-gatherers in South America.

He told BBC News that the direct link between success in hunting and reproduction highlighted by this study could "help in our thinking about humans".

Professor Gurven, who was not involved in this study, added that the nature of this exchange of meat for sex is "kind of like pair bonding in humans, because it's long-term.

"This highlights something we haven't seen in chimps before."

Girls Just Want to Have Fun

The un-slut generation

Women 'want no-strings sex'
5:00AM Saturday December 08, 2007 New Zealand Herald
By Simon Collins

Two young women researchers are calling for a new form of sexual ethics that would allow women to have casual sex without feeling that they're "sluts".

They say the popular view of women as either promiscuous or passive victims has failed to reduce incidents of rape and sexual assault.

Instead, they want both women and men to think about what each of them really wants out of a sexual encounter, and negotiate how to get it.

Canadian sociologist Melanie Beres, a post-doctoral researcher at Auckland University, and Auckland doctoral student Pantea Farvid told a sociology conference yesterday that rape prevention efforts should stop just giving women tips to avoid harm and promote an ethic of "self-care and care for the other".

Dr Beres interviewed young Canadians aged 19 to 25 about their casual sex experiences, while Ms Farvid interviewed New Zealanders in the same age bracket. The New Zealand women were more likely to have actively initiated casual sex, whereas the Canadians were more likely to say it "just happened". Drink was used by some as an excuse for their choices.

Studies have shown New Zealanders start sex younger than in many countries and have high rates of teen pregnancies and STDs. By the age of 25, 13 per cent of women have had more than 10 sexual partners.

Dr Beres said some women deliberately challenged society's "double standard" that said casual sex was okay for men. One woman in her study took the initiative in sexual encounters and another had decided that a serious relationship would hinder her career, so she sought casual sex to meet her physical needs.

Ms Farvid said a more open approach to sex would move away from the legal idea that the only issue in sexual morality was consent.

In some highly publicised group sex cases, men had escaped conviction because of doubts over consent. But on the basis of care for oneself and others, it would be unethical to have "four men in a room with a woman".

Sex or the Internet?

Americans Can Go Without Sex Longer Than The Internet, Study Finds

If they can't access the Internet when they want to, Americans say they worry that they're missing out on something important.
By Sharon Gaudin
InformationWeek

September 21, 2007 12:48 PM

Not tonight, Honey. I'm online.

Sound familiar? A survey of about 1,000 Americans showed that the Internet has become such an essential part of their every-day lives that 28% said they spend less time socializing with friends because of it. And 20% said they spend less time having sex because they're too busy online, according to a study by advertising agency JWT.

"It's clear that there's been a huge cumulative shift in what we do and what we pay attention to, thanks to new technologies," said Bob Jeffrey, chairman and CEO of JWT, in a written statement. "Increasingly, you will see the emergence of truly passionate 'digitivity denizens,' or people who thrive in a technology-enabled universe. They see their cell phones as extensions of themselves, their online and offline lives are co-mingled, and they would choose a Wi-Fi connection over television any day. Trending younger, these are people who don't distinguish between old and new media -- in fact, new media is not thought of as new, it's just media."

According to JWT, only 17% of the 1,011 online Americans who participated in the survey said they willingly had gone without connectivity for more than two weeks within the past year. When asked how long they would feel OK without online access, 15% of respondents said just a day or less, 21% said a couple of days and another 19% said a few days.

About half of people 35 and older said if they can't access the Internet when they want to, they feel like something important is missing.

The survey showed that time spent with new digital technologies eats into time spent watching television or listening to the radio. Forty-four percent said they spend less time with print newspapers and magazines, and 47% watch less TV, though that number jumps to 52% for those under 35. And fully half of respondents say they now spend less time shopping in actual brick-and-mortar stores.

However, traditional media isn't the only ones taking a hit. JWT noted that respondents said being online cuts into physical activities, face-to-face socializing and, yes, even sex.

Is there anything they spend more time doing? Yup. Work. According to the study, 22% said new technologies have led to more work.

The study also showed that people who didn't grow up with interactive digital technology tend to see online and offline as separate worlds. For people immersed in the technology, though, there's no big distinction. Online is just part of normal life, like a car and TV, they noted.

The new digital divide is all about mobility, according to JWT.

"Now it's connectivity with mobility that marks the digital generation divide," said Marian Salzman, a JWT spokesman in a written statement. "Older Americans are happy to sit in the same place to go online, while younger people expect to be able to connect anywhere at any time, without being tethered to a particular location or time frame. Mobility represents the next big shift."

For those respondents younger than 35, 78% said they don't own a desktop computer, compared with 93% of those older than 55. Instead, 61% of the under-35s own a laptop, compared with 36% of those over 55.

Why do we have sex? Why do you have sex?

Top reasons for men:

1. I was attracted to the person.
2. It feels good.
3. I wanted to experience physical pleasure.
4. It's fun.
5. I wanted to show my affection to the person.
6. I was sexually aroused and wanted the release.
7. I was "horny".
8. I wanted to express my love for the person.
9. I wanted to achieve an orgasm.
10. I wanted to please my partner.

Top reasons for women:

1. I was attracted to the person.
2. I wanted to experience physical pleasure.
3. It feels good.
4. I wanted to show my affection to the person.
5. I wanted to express my love for the person.
6. I was sexually aroused and wanted the release.
7. I was "horny".
8. It's fun.
9. I realised I was in love.
10. I was "in the heat of the moment"

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Source: Archives of Sexual Behaviour/AP