WCBSTV reports: Federal regulators on Monday charged a New York brokerage firm and a California investment adviser with securities fraud, accusing them of funneling billions of dollars from investors into Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.

The Securities and Exchange Commission announced civil fraud charges against Cohmad Securities, its chairman, Maurice Cohn, chief operating officer Marcia Cohn and broker Robert Jaffe.

Named in a second SEC lawsuit was Los Angeles-based investment adviser Stanley Chais, who allegedly oversaw three funds that invested all of their assets — nearly $1 billion — with Madoff.

Madoff secretly controlled New York-based Cohmad and used it to procure a steady stream of funds for his multibillion-dollar fraud, the SEC said.

While channeling billions in investor funds to Madoff, the associates together collected several hundred million dollars in fees from the now-disgraced money manager, the SEC alleged.

The agency’s lawsuits were filed in federal court in Manhattan. One accuses Cohmad, the Cohns and Jaffe of actively marketing Madoff’s funds to prospective investors “while knowingly or recklessly disregarding” facts that indicated he was running a fraud. A second suit alleges that Chais committed fraud by misrepresenting his role in managing the three funds’ assets and providing account statements to investors that he should have known were false.

Chais has protrayed himself for the past 40 years as an investment “wizard” who managed hundreds of millions of dollars of investor funds in the three partnerships, according to the SEC. In truth, he was little more than a middleman who merely turned over all of the funds’ assets to Madoff while charging the funds more than $250 million in fees, the agency said.

Attorneys for the Cohns, Jaffe and Chais didn’t immediately return telephone calls seeking comment.

Massachusetts’ secretary of state, William Galvin, has sought to revoke Cohmad’s registration as a securities broker, saying the firm had refused to provide information about its connections to Madoff, who was a co-owner.

Cohmad has denied Galvin’s claim that it appeared to have received more than $67 million from Madoff’s investment firm in “account supervision” fees from 2000 to 2008, representing a large share of Cohmad’s income.

The court-appointed trustee in the Madoff case, Irving Picard, has also filed a complaint against Chais — as well as other big money managers and investors — as part of a far-reaching bid to retrieve funds to pay off thousands of claims from defrauded Madoff clients. Chais has denied any wrongdoing.

More than 100 victims of failed financier Bernard Madoff’s multibillion-dollar fraud urged a judge last week to sentence him harshly, saying he ruined their lives, leaving many of them depressed, bitter and hopeless.

In 113 statements, the victims from across the country repeatedly referred to the 71-year-old Madoff as a “monster” who, as one victim put it, has “no soul, no remorse, no conscience.”