For lease: office with river views — and Madoff's stigma

NEW YORK — Behind unmarked doors on the 17th floor of a red granite high-rise known as the Lipstick Building, FBI agents still labor to unravel a case like no other.

The agents — already there for more than six months — say the chore is so daunting, they need to stay in the Manhattan skyscraper at least another year.

And by the way: They intend to hang on to the copy machine.

The former headquarters of Bernard Madoff are a home away from home for the FBI and, as of July 1, a leasing opportunity for any potential tenant who can stomach its status as ground zero of the largest securities swindle in history.

"Some people may see a stigma associated with it," building manager Russell Freeman said on a recent tour of the piece of the three-floor firm that's been put on the market. "But he's out of there. His bad karma has gone with him ... Space is space."

Space once used by Madoff himself — a fishbowl corner office with partial views of the East River — has been emptied of most furniture and paperwork, like the rest of the 19th floor. Only a pair of built-in cabinets and a wall-mounted television, easily 10 years old, remain.

Across the room is a matching corner office where Madoff's brother Peter worked. Two smaller glass offices were for Madoff sons Andrew and Mark. Two filing-cabinet drawers still bear stickers with Mark Madoff's name.

The three men, whose names remain on an automated directory in the building lobby, oversaw a trading floor for Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities that's now a ghost town, dead silent except for the hiss of an air conditioner.

The color theme throughout — from the refrigerator in a galley kitchen to the trading floor desks to the many conference rooms — is the minimalist black and ash gray favored by the 71-year-old former Nasdaq chairman, one of the original tenants when the building opened in the mid-1980s.

Floors 17 through 19 became part of a crime scene later last year, when the once-prominent money manager confessed that his secretive investment advisory group actually was a massive Ponzi scheme that wiped out thousands of investors. He was sentenced to 150 years in prison last month and on Thursday decided not to appeal the sentence.