He better set up a payment plan!Bernie Madoff’s former director of operations was ordered to forfeit $155 billion and sentenced to 10 years in prison Monday — despite his pleas that he was yet another victim of the callous Ponzi schemer. Daniel Bonventre, 67, was instrumental in maintaining fraudulent record-keeping including the Madoff firm’s general ledger, financial statements and stock record. His documents understated Madoff’s liabilities by billions of dollars.”I was used by the ultimate conman. He was a manipulator beyond manipulator,” Bonventre said before being sentenced. “Everyone was expendable … Bernard Madoff lied to me every day and I believed and trusted him.” But his claims of ignorance did not sway Manhattan Federal Judge Laura Swain, who ordered he forfeit the stunning sum of $155,158,703,200. “He was a pampered, compliant and overcompensated worker who willfully blinded himself to inconvenient truths,” Swain said. Bonventre is among five ex-employees of Madoff Securities who will be sentenced this week. The order of forfeiture is to be shared by all who have been convicted in the fraud. Still, the judge added that Bonventre did not have full knowledge of Madoff’s historic fraud. “(Bonventre) was not a coldly calculating, knowing participant in the Ponzi scheme,” Swain said. She said that Bonventre, an employee of Madoff’s for 40 years, was aware a fraud was taking place beginning in 1992. “These are, literally, devastatingly serious crimes,” Swain said, referring to the countless investors screwed by Madoff. “Dreams and trusts were shattered. So many innocent lives were irreversibly upended. This is the harm you, Mr. Bonventre, and your co-conspirators have wrought.” Once out of prison Bonventre will face two years of supervised release. “We all stand among the smoking ruins of literally thousands of lives,” Swain said. “Your life has been shattered as well.” Originally posted by by Stephen Rex Brown for the New York Daily News and on the Pasadena Law Blog Ball & Evans and Ball & Evans – Los Angeles Business Litigation Attorney