Naming names: 13,500 clients on roster submitted to court

A list of 13,500 alleged victims of Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme was publicized Thursday in bankruptcy court filings, yielding new information about the identities of his clients and creating new variations of the guessing game sparked by the original disclosure of his massive fraud. There is already a dedicated online search engine to make the "game" easier, MadoffSearch.com.

Madoff operated mainly through agents, who found him investors, largely through their own social networks. The networking is clearly evident in the client list. It includes 2,167 people who live in New York, where Madoff also lives, and 2,776 from Florida, where Madoff recruited many of his Jewish victims. Palm Beach, where Madoff maintains a luxurious home, provided 569 investors, many of them individuals who joined the town's golf club partly in order to rub elbows with Madoff and join his elite circle of investors.

Jewish names are noticeably prominent on the list of alleged clients, with 50 Cohens, 23 Rosenbergs and 42 Levys alone.

Six Israeli investors are featured on the list, including Marshall Butler, one of the founders of the Infiniti and the Nitzanim venture capital funds and a major investor in the FIMI investment company. He was the main investor in Pixer Technology, which was sold to the German optics firm Carl Zeiss for $70 million.

Moshe Talansky, the main witness in the "envelopes affair" investigation of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, is on the list of Madoff's alleged victims, as is U.S. media personality Larry King, who reportedly had $1 million invested with Madoff. Madoff's wife, sons, brother, other relatives and his lawyer are also thought to have lost large amounts.

Ironically, Marc Rich, the fugitive financier who was famously pardoned by president Bill Clinton, also appears on the client list.

Charities and philanthropic funds lost more than $3.1 billion they had invested with Madoff. Jewish organizations, including many that contributed to Israeli causes, are taking the brunt of the fallout. Earlier estimates put losses to Israel at tens of millions of dollars but the true numbers are probably higher.

A list obtained by Nicholas Kristoff of The New York Times and published on his blog there names 147 private foundations invested with Madoff whose known possible exposure totals $2.2 billion. The list is only a partial one and does not include, for example, organizations that contribute to Israel's Hadassah hospitals, the Haifa Technion and various Israeli universities and research institutions, which lost $90 million, $72 million and $50 million with Madoff, respectively.