The old place was swanky.

It has a 24-hour doorman and river views, but the real appeal of 377 Rector Place—a building that is about as bland as a luxury tower can be—lies in its name: Liberty House. Particularly if one is about to start a 10-year prison sentence.

The New York Post reports that Peter Madoff and wife Marion have moved into a $3,200-per month one-bedroom rental in the Battery Park City building. For someone who has agreed, as part of plea bargain, to the criminal forfeiture of $143.1 billion, including all real estate and personal property, a rental is definitely the way to go.

The new place: not bad. Way nicer than prison.

Of the couple's vast, ill-begotten fortune, Marion was allowed to keep $771,733, an amount that still seems like a fortune to most of us, if not a vast one.

Madoff frère pleaded guilty in June to helping his brother bilk investors out of out billions, although he maintained that he had no idea that by falsifying business records he was helping to perpetrate what may go down in history as the greatest Ponzi scheme of all time.

A claim that was dismissed by US District Judge Laura Swain as “frankly, not believable,” according to the Daily News

The Madoffs needed someplace to stay, having just sold their 7-room co-op at 975 Park Avenue for $4.6 million.

While the provenance of Mr. Madoff's former pad might bother some potential buyers, all proceeds of the sale go to victim restitution. Sources have said that the Madoffs weren't even allowed to keep their dishes and other basic household items. Time for an Ikea run?

Mr. Madoff has less than a month to enjoy his liberty, Liberty House or the view of Lady Liberty in the New York Harbor. He's scheduled to start serving his sentence on February 6, thanks to a delay he was granted to attend his granddaughter's Bat Mitzvah.

As for the properties belonging to the rest of the Madoff clan, they will likely hit the market in the not-too-distant future as prosecutors and trustees make their way through the massively complicated fraud case. These include Andrew Madoff's $4.3 million apartment at 433 East 74th Street and Mark Madoff’s $6 million Soho apartment at 583 Broadway Avenue, where he committed suicide. Both of the brothers' Greenwich homes are also in the mix.

kvelsey@observer.com

The superseding indictment adds new charges against Daniel Bonventre, who worked for Mr. Madoff for 40 years, eventually rising to the position of director of operations, as well as Annette Bongiorno and Joann Crupi, and brings charges against BLMIS computer programmers Jerome O'Hara and George Perez for the first time.

"We will not rest until all the alleged participants and enablers are made to answer for their conduct," U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement.

Mr. Madoff was sentenced in 2009 to a maximum sentence of 150 years.

The Standard Chartered exec who complained that "f---ing Americans" had no place telling the bank how to do business in Iran appears to be Richard Meddings, according to The New York Post.

We love it when the food fight between banks and politicians spills over to encompass...the entire cities of New York and London. Like when New York congressman Carolyn Maloney asked Jamie Dimon why JPMorgan executed trades that lost billions of dollars out of its London office. Why not New York? Or yesterday, when British lawmaker Mark Field painted reports of bad behavior at Standard Chartered as a battle in the war between the two cities. Reuters also heard complaints of anti-London bias in reference to the DFS order.

Two hedge funds are fighting a legal battle over whether they had a contract to trade $195 million in claims on Bernie Madoff's bankrupt firm. Solus Alternative Asset Management says it struck a deal with Perry Capital over telephone and instant messages; Perry says there never was a deal.

Hedge fund manager Doug Whitman, on trial for insider trading, told government witness Roomy Khan that he had no use for her if she wouldn't break the law, according to The Post. “You’re not going to be a slimeball, what do I want to talk to you for,” Whitman told Khan in a wiretapped conversation.

Knight Capital's privately-financed rescue deal was a bitter pill for investors looking for too-big-to-fail profits.

The Japanese units of Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan were among banks to pledge improvements in guarding client information in the wake of insider trading investigations that have roiled Nomura Holdings and other Japanese financial institutions. Also in Japan, measures to clamp down on loan-sharking were seen tied to a reduction in suicide for "economic reasons." Now restrictions against non-bank lending may be pared back, and observers worry about the consequences.

Deutsche Bank's on-again off-again efforts to sell its real estate fund group, RREEF, is putting the business at a competitive disadvantage, investors and consultants tell The Wall Street Journal.

The government came for Ruth and Bernie Madoff's penthouse years ago, but the real estate holdings of the rest of the family have taken a little longer to claim, as the courts untangle the many complications of recovering cash stolen by the clan.

But now a two-bedroom Park Avenue co-op owned by Bernie's brother Peter has finally hit the market, The Wall Street Journal reports. And lis penden notices have been filed against properties belonging to Madoff's son Andrew and late son Mark, according to The New York Post. Altogether, the homes are worth more than $20 million.

The sixth floor co-op that Peter Madoff owned at 975 Park Avenue is now on the market for $4 million, which is $100,000 less than Mr. Madoff and his wife Marion paid for it in 2004, according to The Journal, not counting the cost of renovations. Not that the sale price matters to the couple.

Neither Mrs. nor Mr. Madoff—who pled guilty to fraud charges in June—will get the proceeds of this sale or the sale of their house on Long Island, which is currently on the market for $5.29 million. The monies will be turned over to the U.S. Marshals Service, as part of an agreement that Mr. Madoff and his family signed as part of his guilty plea.

But Mr. Madoff won't need the place anymore anyway. He'll be living in far less lavish accommodations—a prison cell—when he begins his 10-year sentence later this year. As for Ms. Madoff, she can buy a more modest pad with the $771,733 she's allowed to keep as part of the settlement (we'd recommend Yorkville).

The properties belonging to Bernie Madoff's two sons and their families have not yet hit the market, but the lis penden notices warn potential buyers that they really aren't really the Madoff family's to sell. Trustee Irving Picard has a claim to both Andrew Madoff's $4.3 million apartment at 433 East 74th Street and Mark Madoff's $6 million Soho apartment at 583 Broadway Avenue, where he committed suicide (we doubt that one will sell anytime soon anyway). The government is also going after both of the brother's houses in Greenwich. Just how much the government can claim depends on the resolution of the $255 million suit against Madoff's relatives.

kvelsey@observer.com

Mr. Standford, of course, is the former Texas billionaire convicted of 13 counts of fraud, using fraudulent bills of deposit at his offshore bank to swindle 30,000 investors in 113 countries. Also a former Knight of Antigua and noted cricket enthusiast who owned his own professional cricket team, plus jets, yachts and other knightly trappings.

Even in sentencing, Mr. Stanford refused the allure of contrition, blaming the government for the fall of Stanford International Bank, and telling the court, "If I live the rest of my life in prison, I will always be at peace with the way I conducted myself in business."

*According to a defense memo: "In a Ponzi scheme, a swindler promises a large return for investments made with him. ...The payments are not financed through the success of the underlying venture but are taken from the corpus of the newly attracted investments." And: "It was clearly shown at trial that Stanford actually made investments."

Still, Mr. Stanford can take heart (or eat his heart out) knowing that his sentence is dwarfed by the 150 years handed down to Bernie Madoff.

Reuters jumped on the Wall Street job-cuts theme last night, forecasting more firings in months to come. From the story: "It's just the perfect storm: You've got zero rates which are unheard of, squashing net interest margins like never before in history; the greatest regulation ever limiting fees, raising costs, demanding more capital; and then you've got a brewing economic disaster in Europe," said [JPM Securities analyst David] Trone.

Felix Salmon suggests investment bank cutbacks aren't really news.

The payback: Timothy J. Mayopoulos was named Fannie Mae's next CEO, which should do little to ease tensions between the government-sponsored entity and Bank of America. Mr. Mayopoulos was fired from his role as BofA's general counsel in 2008. The two companies have been grappling over whether BofA will buy back billions in mortgages with faulty underwriting that it sold to Fannie.

Whale inquest: Officials from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve will testify at a Senate Banking Committee hearing today on trading losses in JPMorgan's chief investment office.

Whither Europe: Germany is working on a plan to recapitalize Spanish banks with European rescue funds without burdening Spain with the stringent economic reforms placed on bailed-out neighbors such as Greece and Ireland.

Trustees clash: Tensions were already high between Louis Freeh and James Giddens, the two trustees seeking to recover claims arising from MF Global's collapse last fall. Then Mr. Freeh, who's responsible for recovering funds for the parent company's bondholders, demanded $2.3 billion from MF Global's brokerage unit—a move Mr. Giddens said would force him to set aside funds that might otherwise go to MF Global customers.

Complaint box: Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner pressed bank executives to spell out specific objections to Dodd-Frank.

Gotcha: After burying its head in the sand for years when it came to a ponzi scheme that cost investors billions, the government appears to be tying up loose ends such as this one—a former Bernard L Madoff Securities employee named Craig Kugel pled guilty yesterday to tax fraud. On one hand, Mr. Kugel was aware that the firm paid salaries and benefits to people who did not actually work for the firm. On the other, Mr. Kugel "charged more than $200,000 in personal expenses, including luxury clothes, jewelry, and vacations for himself and his family, to a corporate American Express card but did not report it as income on his tax returns." Mr. Kugel faces up to 19 years in prison.

Host George Stephanopoulos also took the time to ask the mayor what he thought  of Bernie Madoff's jailhouse interview, in which he claimed that banks had to know of his fraud.

"I don't know who knew what. What I do know is Bernie did it," the mayor said.

And he said that investors who put the money with Madoff should have suspected that something was up.

"Anybody thinks that they can beat the market long term by an awful lot is just being unrealistic," Bloomberg said. "But I think the lesson is a lesson that your mother told you and my mother told me a long time ago: Don't put all your eggs in one basket."

Bloomberg also said that he thought the federal government should re-start the way it deals with the budget by starting with which programs are vital for the country in the future and then figure out a way to fund them, instead of figuring how to allocate the money they have.

And the mayor hedged on a question of whether or not new revenues are needed. He has argued strenuously against raising city taxes, citing the fear that the highest income earners would simply move elsewhere, but obviously that logic would not hold for the federal government.

Finally, Bloomberg was asked what he thinks of the rumors of a Donald Trump presidential bid.

His response? "America is a wonderful country."

Now it has new owners, who are hopeful that a $15 million touch-up will be enough to rehabilitate the troubled tower. Argentina's largest landlord and the brothers who founded retailer Guess teamed up to buy the building last year, according to The Journal. The deal was valued at about $395 million, or about $620 a square foot.

Haim Revah paid $648.5 million for the building in 2007. By 2010, Mr. Revah's real-estate group, Metropolitan Real Estate Investors, had defaulted on its mortgage from Royal Bank of Canada.

The new owners, Daniel Elsztain and Paul and Maurice Marciano told the bank they would be interested in putting in fresh capital, ending last month in a restructuring, and the agreement to do the reno.

Of course, the new owners realize that no amount of plaster and gloss can cover the building's association with one particular tenant. But if you can't shake it, embrace it. Said Mr. Elsztain, a third-generation member of his family's real estate dynasty: "When he was big, Madoff had his choice of all the buildings in the city, and he chose this building."

lkusisto@observer.com

Authorities accuse the 62-year-old ex-Madoff assistant of defrauding investors and helping keep Mr. Madoff's Ponzi scheme in motion. Says The Journal:

The Journal reports:

Ms. Bongiorno, who has been on home incarceration and subject to electronic monitoring in Florida, has had difficulty meeting the conditions of a $5 million bail set last month. Prosecutors also have raised concerns in recent weeks about her access to $2.4 million in "liquid assets," which they want to seize.

mtaylor [at] observer.com | @mbrookstaylor