By Joseph Ax
NEW YORK, March 24 (Reuters) - When it came down to it, the evidence was simply too overwhelming.
That was what several jurors said on Monday after they convicted five former Bernard Madoff associates of helping to conceal his multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme.
The verdict -- guilty on all counts -- came after just 20 hours of deliberations, which paled in comparison to the trial's extraordinary length. At more than five months, it was one of the longest white-collar criminal trials in the history of the federal court in Manhattan.
But the jurors, interviewed after the verdict, said there was never really any doubt in their minds about the outcome.
"It was the overall picture," said Sheila Amato, an art teacher from Rockland County, a suburb of New York City. "The facts speak for themselves."
The five employees -- back-office director Daniel Bonventre, portfolio managers Annette Bongiorno and Joann Crupi and computer programmers Jerome O'Hara and George Perez -- claimed they believed Madoff's business was legitimate and were fooled into becoming unknowing accomplices.
Starting in October, the jurors heard approximately 40 witnesses testify and saw thousands of documents admitted into evidence, creating a trial transcript that reached 12,000 pages. The closing arguments stretched nearly 25 hours over two weeks.
In all, the jurors had to determine a verdict for 59 individual charges, with Bonventre alone facing 20 different counts of securities fraud, conspiracy, bank fraud, filing false tax returns, and falsifying records.
Craig Parise, a fifth-grade teacher from Westchester County, another New York suburb, said the fact that the fraud persisted for so long made it hard to believe that the defendants, some of whom worked at the firm for decades, were completely unaware.
"It would be different if it was a four-month Ponzi scheme," he said. "When it was 40 years, it's very hard to overlook that."
Defense lawyers tried to undermine the government's star witness, Madoff's top deputy, Frank DiPascali, by painting him as a career con man with a talent for deception that rivaled only that of Madoff himself.
But the jurors said they found his testimony credible and compelling.
"It was pretty captivating," Amato said of DiPascali's testimony. "It wasn't scripted."
That stood in contrast to the testimony from Bongiorno and Bonventre, who both made the unusual decision to take the stand in their own defense. The jurors emphatically rejected their claims that they had no idea what was going on.
"I don't think it helped their case," Parise said. "It was slightly insulting. I think there was a lot of coaching going on."