NEW YORK – In December 2008, two of Bernard Madoff’s most loyal employees met on a Manhattan street corner and fretted over a closely held secret the rest of the world would learn about eight days later: their boss was a con man for the ages.

Frank DiPascali told JoAnn Crupi that Madoff had just confided that his investment firm was out of money and that client accounts – worth billions – actually had no more value than Monopoly money, authorities say. The exchange was recounted for the first time in a newly rewritten indictment this week expanding the case and charges against five defendants headed for a trial next year.

The indictment brings into focus the final few years of a fraud the government said dated to the early 1970s, two decades before Madoff claimed it began and well before 1992, when the government said in its original case against the defendants that the conspiracy began.