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We've heard nothing from Bernard Madoff since he was convicted of orchestrating a $65 billion Ponzi scheme and sentenced to 150 years behind bars, though fellow inmates have painted a picture of the prison-era Madoff as a kind of unrepentant criminal celebrity.

But Madoff is mum no longer. The New York Times' Diana B. Henriques has just published the first interview with Madoff since his arrest in December 2008. He looked "noticeably thinner and rumpled in khaki prison garb" and "seemed frail and a bit agitated," Henriques notes, but still speaks "with great intensity and fluency about his dealings." Here are some of the biggest revelations from the interview:



Banks 'Had to Know' of Fraud



Madoff--who long maintained that he acted alone--suggested for the first time that unnamed banks and hedge funds were "complicit" in his Ponzi scheme by demonstrating a "willful blindness" when it came to his regulatory filings and suspicions about his financial results.



"They had to know. But the attitude was sort of, 'If you're doing something wrong, we don't want to know,'" Madoff said. Henriques adds that "while he acknowledged his guilt in the interview and said nothing could excuse his crimes, he focused his comments laserlike on the big investors and giant institutions he dealt with, not on the financial pain he caused thousands of his more modest investors."

