Convicted Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff, in a jailhouse interview published Wednesday, said banks and hedge funds were “complicit” in his multi-billion dollar fraud.

“They had to know,” Madoff told New York Times reporter Diana B. Henriques, who is working on a book about the case. “But the attitude was sort of, ‘If you’re doing something wrong, we don’t want to know.’ “

Madoff, serving a 150-year prison term in Butner, N.C., did not specify which banks or funds might have known about the scheme, and he didn’t say that any of them were accomplices to his scheme.