Staggering $7.3 billion in losses threaten to scuttle Nashville native's once high-flying New York fund

If you’ve so much as glanced at the national news in the last few days, you’ve heard all about Wall Street pariah, and perfectly named scam operator Bernard Madoff, and the growing list of high-end investors whom he duped.

What hasn’t been reported locally, however, is that the odds-on favorite for hardest hit investor is hometown boy Walter Noel.

Noel, a Montgomery Bell Academy (’48) and Vanderbilt (’52) graduate, is a founding partner of the prominent New York-based hedge fund Fairfield Greenwich Group, which sent some $7.3 billion to Madoff over the course of 20 years. That number accounts for more than half of the group’s assets.

Reports have said that Fairfield Greenwich is planning a lawsuit against Madoff claiming that it performed the required due diligence, but to have simply fallen victim of fraud.

Whatever the case, getting the money back will likely be a tremendously difficult endeavor, as our local, now seemingly quaint multi-million-dollar schemes have shown. And Fairfield Greenwich is likely facing its own raft of lawsuits, as investors who paid the firm hundreds of millions of dollars to place their money become understandably disgruntled.

In addition to those woes, yesterday it was reported that the Madoff affair has killed a previously announced merger between Fairfield Greenwich and Swiss bank Banque Bénédict Hentsch.

So far, NashvilleFiles.com has yet to learn of any local creditors in the case.