The San Francisco Chronicle reports that “Bernard Madoff’s longtime secretary said Wednesday that she believes the disgraced financier is not cooperating with authorities in order to protect others, and that he was a flirtatious boss who frequented massage parlors.

Eleanor Squillari, Madoff’s secretary of more than 20 years, told The Associated Press she thinks her former boss carefully orchestrated his arrest and that he’s protecting others who might have been involved in his multibillion-dollar scheme by not cooperating with investigators. She declined to speculate as to whom he might be protecting.

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The 59-year-old Squillari spent two months helping the FBI gather evidence against the former money manager.

In the article, Squillari said her married former boss was flirtatious and made sexually suggestive remarks. She said she once saw him perusing the escort ads in the back of a magazine and said he frequented massage parlors.

“Once, I looked in his address book and found, under M, about a dozen phone numbers for his masseuses,” she wrote. “If you ever lose your address book and somebody finds it, they’re going to think you’re a pervert, I said.”

“‘Oh, you know you’re crazy about me,’ he would say to me. Sometimes when he came out of his bathroom, which was diagonal to my desk, he would still be zipping up his pants. If he saw me shaking my head disapprovingly, he would say ‘Oh, you know it excites you,'” she wrote.

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She wrote that Madoff said he always had his wife, Ruth, watch the books and that “nothing gets by Ruth.”

Squillari said she was surprised when he added: “Well, you know what happens is, it starts out with you taking a little bit, maybe a few hundred, a few thousand. You get comfortable with that, and before you know it, it snowballs into something big.”

Madoff, 70, pleaded guilty in March to charges that his secretive investment advisory operation was a multibillion-dollar fraud. The former Nasdaq chairman faces up to 150 years in prison.  Poor Bernie!  Bernie Madoff, the International Symbol of Greed and Betrayal!

Madoff’s attorney, Ira Sorkin, said Wednesday he has no comment on any of the secretary’s allegations.

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