• Lawyers for Madoff may be planning to mount an insanity defense if the case goes to trial. [NYDN]
• Madoff has until Wednesday to provide a list of all investments, loans, lines of credit, brokerage accounts and other holdings to the SEC. [Bloomberg]
• In the meantime, forensic accountants are looking into whether Madoff sent large sums of money to offshore accounts in places like the Caribbean. [Guardian]
• Not surprisingly, l'affaire Madoff should keep a long list of lawyers very busy for a very long time. [NYP]
• Although Latin Americans are believed to have been big losers in Madoff's scheme, very few have come forward to acknowledge the losses. [WSJ]
• A burglar stole a $10,000 statue from Madoff's Palm Beach estate. [NYP]
• Bernie Madoff's most famous neighbor, Matt Lauer, isn't so thrilled by the reporters camped outside their building on East 64th Street. [P6]

In what could be the worst legal strategy since George Bluth faked a heart attack, New York Daily News gossips Rush & Molloy report hedge fund hustler Bernie Madoff is considering an insanity defense.

Eric Roth, the writer behind current Brad Pitt vehicle The Curious Case of Benjamin Button as well as Forrest Gump, is suing the investment manager who put his money into Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme. He joins a long list of people who say they lost millions in the alleged fraud.

What Bernie Madoff's $50 billion Ponzi scheme and other upper-class scandals of the season tell us: Staying rich is not as easy as it looks. Sometimes it requires incredibly dumb and desperate acts.

It seems we weren't the only ones to call Monica Noel! When the Times of London dialed her up, she mistakenly thought she was talking to a friend and described her plans to attend a wedding in Mexico. Nice to hear the implosion of her husband's business, class-action lawsuits, and tawdry rumors about her daughters isn't impacting her social calendar! [Business Sheet]

Bernie Madoff's alleged $50 billion swindle was a Jew-on-Jew crime. Jewish investors and charities lost a bundle. Now they suffer disgrace of having another anti-Semitic evil-banker stereotype. And Jewish media watchdogs are not helping!

Bernie Madoff is facing a long stretch in prison for bilking investors out of $50 billion, and plenty of theories have been batted around as to what might have motivated Madoff to carry out his devious scheme. Was it just about the money? Did he feel any sense of shame as he ripped off hundreds of investors and non-profits? And will there be any sort of redemption for Madoff at the end of the day? To get a little perspective on what it's like to carry out a massive financial fraud, keep the scam going undetected for years, eventually get caught, and then account for the wrongdoing, we turned to someone who's been through all that (and more): Sam Antar, who, along with his cousin Eddie Antar, built Crazy Eddie into a electronics powerhouse in the '70s and '80s until the company came crashing down and the Antars were indicted on a variety of charges.

We didn't have much success last week getting one of our operatives past Bernie Madoff's doorman, and we really didn't have any interest in trekking to Greenwich to pay a visit to our second favorite villain in the saga, Walter Noel. But could we at least get Walter or his wife Monica on the phone? Ask and ye shall receive. After calling half a dozen numbers and getting nowhere at Walter's office (voicemail), his house in Greenwich (the maid picked up), the Noel home in Southampton (was it one of his infamous daughters who picked up?), and the Noel's apartment on Park Avenue, we finally got a hold of Mrs. Noel herself. You can view the video above to see how it went down. But we're guessing you're going to come to the same conclusion we did: Monica does not sound like a very happy woman these days.

It wouldn't be Christmas Eve without fighting: Alec Baldwin supposedly slammed Tina Fey's body; Paris Hilton's uncle got attacked and robbed in his home and Nicole Kidman was haunted by Katie Holmes.

• The number of workers filing new claims for jobless benefits jumped by 30,000 to a 26-year peak last week. [Reuters]
• AmEx and CIT will get $5.72 billion in bailout money. [Reuters]
• Doubts about Bernie Madoff now appear to date back several decades. [WSJ]
• Liliane Bettencourt, the world's wealthiest woman, is believed to have invested in Bernie Madoff via Thierry Magon de La Villehuchet, the money manager who committed suicide at his office yesterday. [Bloomberg, NYT]
• Steve Feinberg's Cerberus, which has suffered several losing months, is now limiting investor redemptions. [Bloomberg]
• Execs at Old Lane, the hedge fund operated by Vikram Pandit before it was acquired by Citigroup, may be leaving the bank to start a new company. [WSJ]
• Hedge funder Larry Robbins is cutting compensation and staff. [NYP]

Bernie Madoff's $50 billion Ponzi scheme is growing fatally baroque. A French banker was found dead, in a grotesque office tableau, after losing $1.4 billion in the scheme.

A French hedge fund founder who lost $2 billion he'd invested with disgraced money manager Bernie Madoff killed himself in his Manhattan office today.

Fox Business caught up with Bernie Madoff's sketchy accountant, David Friehling, after he made an appearance today at the Clarkstown, NY police department. Friehling refused to answer a Fox Business reporter's questions, but his son did take a moment to dump water on the network's van. Now that's a classy way to handle the situation, isn't it? [Fox Business]

Monica Noel, the wife of disgraced hedge fund manager, protested this week to the Post that she and her husband aren't really all that rich, notwithstanding the $500 million her husband's firm is estimated to have collected just by steering clients to invest with Bernie Madoff: "You write [that] our five daughters were brought up in the lap of luxury in their Greenwich estate. We don't live in an estate. We live in a normal house that was a cottage on two acres." That the "cottage" is just one of five properties that the Noels call home—there's also an apartment on Park Avenue, homes in Southampton and Palm Beach, and a "tropical retreat" in Mustique—Monica's claim doesn't seem to hold much water. But you wouldn't mistake the Noels for heavy-hitting philanthropists, at least judging by the couple's charitable donations in recent years. In 2006 (the last year for which info is available), the Walter and Monica Noel Family Foundation handed out a grand total of $169,000, most of it distributed in amounts of $250 or $500 to organizations like Americares, the YMCA of Greenwich, and the International Rescue Committee. After the jump, the complete list of non-profit groups that benefited from Noel's lucrative relationship with Bernie Madoff.

"Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, a founder of the hedge fund Access International Advisors, was found dead early Tuesday in his office in Manhattan, the French business daily La Tribune reported on its Web site, after losing as much as $1.4 billion that had been invested with Bernard L. Madoff." [Dealbook]

What happens when you run a hedge fund and you lose $7.5 billion as part of one of the biggest scams in Wall Street history? Your plans to jet off to Mustique for Christmas might go awry, for one. The Times UK reports that members of the Noel family may not be heading down to their lavish Caribbean retreat after all. Presumably they'll be forced to spend the holidays at their manse in Greenwich. Perhaps fellow hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones will invite them over to admire his Christmas decorations instead? Probably not! [Times UK via Dealbreaker]

• The U.S. economy slowed sharply in the third quarter, according the new figures released by the Commerce Department this morning. [MW]
• Lehman Brothers has won bankruptcy court approval to sell its investment management assets, including Neuberger Berman. [DB]
• What did banks do with their bailout billions? They're not saying. [AP]
• A record number of M&A deals were cancelled in 2009. [FT]
• Investigators looking into the Madoff mess continue to focus their attention on a key Madoff lieutenant, Frank DiPascali. [WSJ]
• A Madoff investor has filed suit against the SEC, the first attempt by a victim of the scheme to go after regulators. [Reuters]

Who'd have guessed that losing your life savings in a elaborate Ponzi scheme would suddenly become trendy? "Because Madoff is said to have only accepted an exclusive group of wealthy investors, saying you got ripped off by Madoff is a subtle way of saying that you've got big money. From those who spend their summers in Nantucket to those spending evenings at the Yale Club, Bernie Madoff has become the new name to drop." [Clusterstock]

It's not all bad news for the folks defrauded by Bernie Madoff. In addition to his handful of homes in Manhattan, Montauk, and Palm Beach, it's likely Madoff's 50 percent stake in this $24 million Embaer Legacy jet will eventually be distributed to the people he cheated as part of his elaborate scheme. The plane, which is based at Long Island's Republic Airport and is just a year old, was purchased by Madoff and real estate developer Edward Blumenfeld, who revealed last week he'd been "invested heavily" in Madoff and had teamed up with him to build a shopping complex in East Harlem. The two, it turns out, also went on family vacations together, which probably explains why they got together to buy the plane. (It's one of two planes that Madoff used on a regular basis: He's also a Netjets customer and is listed as a fractional owner of a Cessna 750 alongside hedge fund billionaire Phil Falcone and Richard Kinder, the former president of Enron.) It's the plane that Madoff co-owns with Blumenthal, though, that you can take for a spin, if you're interested. A company called Talon Air is still leasing Air Bernie, so if you're looking to take 12 friends on a trip—or you just want to see what Bernie used to traipse around the world and rope in new investors—here you go.

Why didn't SEC employees catch Bernie Madoff? Porn browsing. [ProPublica]