Is David Friehling Just A Red Herring?
Right after the Madoff story broke, everyone wanted to know who the hell was auditing the books. The name we learned was David Friehling, a no-namer who is the son-in-law of Madoff’s personal accountant Jerome Horowitz. Since then, nobody has seen David Friehling. Perhaps he fled the country to Switzerland or maybe he’s just holed up at his compound in Rockland County. While investigators will no doubt squeeze Friehling for every last bit of information, we suspect he’ll prove to be a dry lead, largely irrelevent to the crime. Our guess is that Friehling had one role to play in this whole affair: Sign his name on a line so that Madoff could show he was audited by an outsider. But since the whole thing was a fraud, there was no reason for Friehling to have actually done any pretend auditing, or to have any knowledge whatsoever of Madoff’s books. If Friehling was willing to jot his name on a line (for some money and as a favor to the father-in-law), what good is it for Madoff to bring in
