“A federal jury on Monday found five associates of the convicted swindler Bernard L. Madoff guilty of 31 counts of aiding one of the largest Ponzi schemes in history.

“With that verdict, the jurors rejected the former employees’ central defense: that only Mr. Madoff had known the evil purpose behind the chores he told them to carry out, while they had simply trusted for decades in the honesty of a man widely known and respected on Wall Street.

“There’s really no dispute here that there was a massive criminal conspiracy,” John T. Zach, an assistant United States attorney, told the jury early this month, in the closing weeks of a trial that had lasted more than five months.

“The only question, he said, was whether the defendants knowingly committed fraud to help Mr. Madoff sustain that criminal enterprise. “So let me state it to you as clearly as I can,” he said: “The defendants knew that fraud was going on at Madoff Securities.”

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