I'm with you. His involvement doesn't preclude a scam, but it does mean that there was probably an actual business plan, and he performed some amount of due diligence. There is no way any professional investor wants to be near a ponzi scheme. I highly doubt this guy thinks this is a scam.

Cantor Fitzgerald's Betting Affiliate Eyed in Money-Laundering Probe
Federal, State Authorities Investigate Whether Cantor Gaming Failed to Report Suspicious Transactions

Bernard Lawrence "Bernie" Madoff (/ˈmeɪdɒf/;[1] born April 29, 1938) is an American convicted of fraud and a former stockbroker, investment advisor, and financier. He is the former non-executive chairman of the NASDAQ stock market,[2] and the admitted operator of a Ponzi scheme that is considered to be the largest financial fraud in U.S. history.[3]

Madoff founded the Wall Street firm Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC in 1960, and was its chairman until his arrest on December 11, 2008.[4][5] The firm was one of the top market maker businesses on Wall Street,[6] which bypassed "specialist" firms by directly executing orders over the counter from retail brokers.

Wolf of Wall Street
Jordan Ross Belfort[5] (/ˈbɛlfɔːrt/; born July 9, 1962) pleaded guilty to fraud and related crimes in connection with stock market manipulation and running a boiler room as part of a penny stock scam. Belfort spent 22 months in prison as part of an agreement under which he gave testimony against numerous partners and subordinates in his fraud scheme.

In recent years there has been a regular drum beat of news stories warning us about the enormous unfunded liabilities of state and local pension funds. Much of this has come from reports issued from well-endowed foundations, most notably the Pew and Arnold foundations who have a joint project on public pensions.

Ostensibly these foundations are simply providing information to allow the public to address a major policy problem. However, it is difficult not to ask whether these foundations may be pursuing a different agenda.
First, the reports tend to be focused on highlighting the size of the problem. A quick look at Pew's pension page shows the publication "The Widening Gap Update." The lead line in the description is that state pensions had incurred unfunded liabilities of $737 billion as of 2010. The updated version, "The Fiscal Health of State Pension Plans: Funding Gap Continues to Grow" tells readers that the size of the gap had grown to $915 billion based on 2012 data.

Wall Street has a long history of con artists and crooks who bend and break the rules to benefit themselves. This usually leaves regulators scrambling to close the loopholes and specify grey areas in their regulations in order to prevent copycat con men.

There are only a few things you can count on in the world: death, taxes and Wall Street scams. Here are five of the biggest Wall Street scams of all time.

Sam Israel -- Bayou Hedge Fund Group
Total Scammed: $450 Million

Joseph Nacchio -- Qwest Communications International
Total Scammed: $3 Billion

Bernard Ebbers -- WorldCom
Total Scammed: $100 Billion

Kenneth Lay and Jeffery Skilling -- Enron
Total Scammed: $74 Billion

Bernard Madoff -- Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC
Total Scammed: $18 Billion (Or maybe +40 BILLION, still unknown)

The Scam

By understanding how the Wall Street con game operates, you can at least avoid being taken to the cleaners and perhaps go on to study enough to profit from this knowledge.
      The unwary investor is made to believe - by a press owned by the very people who are part of the Wall Street scam - that they can make a killing in the stock market if they get lucky. Over the years outsider, small-time investors have lost billions of dollars to the insiders who control and manipulate the stock market to take money from the ignorant.

     The brainwashed investor believes that the stock market goes up and down according to what he reads in the Wall Street Journal or hears about on his evening TV program: interest rates, inflation rates, wholesale prices, gross national product, public fears about foreign and domestic events, and the rantings of the head of the "Federal" Reserve Board. This is all a con game to make the hapless investor believe that the rise and fall in stock prices is not being manipulated by the specialists. The astounding fact is that specialists, working at the behest of their investment banker cronies, are creating the ups and downs of the market to bring them obscene profits!