Fairfield Greenwich Group: A firm built on ties to Madoff

Sounds like another family owned business. Is there a pattern here?

In early 2008, several private equity and investment firms were approached by Fairfield about purchasing a share of the company. A partner of one that considered buying a stake that he estimated was between one-third and one-half of Fairfield — the firm was valuing itself somewhere between $1 billion and $1.5 billion — said that he was scared off about 20 minutes into his initial meeting with a team of Fairfield managers.

“They were just incredibly squishy and vague even during the warm-up,” said the prospective buyer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of a non-disclosure agreement with Fairfield. “I asked them to tell me about the manager of the fund Sentry feeds into, and I was told, ‘We don’t really talk about him.’ ”

Like Mr. Madoff’s firm, Fairfield was at least in part a family business. Four of Mr. Noel’s sons-in-law worked at Fairfield. But unlike Mr. Madoff, Fairfield’s partners, led by Mr. Noel, were not shy about spending their money and taking a high profile in wealthy New York society circles.

“The last few years, they really made a play to be a part of that New York-Southampton social axis,” David Patrick Columbia, the editor of NewYorkSocialDiary.com, said of Mr. Noel and his family. “It happened so fast that you really noticed them.”

Mr. Noel, whose primary residence and office remain in Greenwich, has at least five luxury homes. Along with his Greenwich house, whose value has been estimated at $4.2 million, he has homes in Southampton and Palm Beach. And since 2000, the Noels have also maintained a pied-à-terre at 812 Park Avenue. The combined value of those homes is more than $20 million.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/22/business/22fairfield.html?_r=1&hp