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The Best of Bernie
Joe Raedle/Getty
We searched the media to unearth the juiciest nuggets about the alleged Ponzi schemer—from the price of his manicures to the vanity plates on his accountant's car.
The Bernard Madoff scandal has so saturated the media that you may have missed some of the juiciest details. Which celebrities did Madoff fleece? How many houses did he own? And what did his accountant’s vanity license plates say? We’ve combed through the records to assemble a dossier: the best of Bernie.
The Madoff Lifestyle
- Bernie is a famous multitasker. On the Thursday of his arrest, “he sat in the FBI’s New York offices with his one wrist handcuffed to a chair and the other holding a telephone he used to contact his attorney.”
- The price of initiation at the Palm Beach Country Club, whose members Madoff conned? $300,000. Madoff’s handicap was a 12, but there is a plausible theory that he might have cheated on the course, too.
- Madoff had a 55-foot yacht named “Bull.”
- Cost of Madoff’s haircuts: $65. Shaves: $40. Pedicures: $50. Manicures: $22.
- Bernie owned a $7 million East 64th St. penthouse, a $9.4 million Palm Beach mansion (8,753 sq. ft.), and a $3.1 million house in Montauk (2,800 sq. ft.). He had to put his houses up as collateral for bail, and is under house arrest in New York.
The price of initiation at the Palm Beach Country Club, whose members Madoff conned? $300,000. Madoff’s handicap was a 12, but there is a plausible theory that he might have cheated on the course, too.
The Family
- Bernie’s wife, Ruth, co-edited a cookbook called The Great Chefs of America Cook Kosher. She might have also aided her husband’s crimes. She’s under investigation.
- Bernie’s niece, Shana Madoff, loved to shop. Sample: “[S]he was thumbing through Harper’s Bazaar when she stumbled across a tweed Prada bag she knew would go perfectly with her Rodriguez basics. She left her friends and walked down the beach saying she had ‘to make an important phone call.’ She ordered the bag on her cell phone.”
- Shana worked as a lawyer for her uncle. Then she married Eric Swanson, an SEC official. Her uncle robbed her. Now her husband’s connections to her uncle’s firm are being investigated.
- Madoff’s sons, Andrew and Mark, turned him in, claiming that they had no knowledge of his scheme. But some are skeptical of their claims.
Quotable
- Bernie on the SEC, October 2007: "They tend to look at the industry as if you're making a profit there's something wrong even though intellectually they know that shouldn't be."
- Bernie to his senior employees, December 10: “It's all just one big lie."
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janrif
Essentially, isn't what the Federal Gov't doing with all the bailouts a giant Ponzi scheme?
Teuthida
I've decided I like Bernie.
Non-profit charities aside, what could be more poetic than one highbrow elitist conning a whole bunch of highbrow elitists out of fortunes produced by being born into the right families with the right connections, obscene inbred wealth used to propagate the social inequality and elitism so destructive of social cohesion.
The irony: Madoff's investors (read 'victims') were lured in with the promise of being involved in something the average sucker could never get (i.e. access to the genuis Madoff) with amounts of money ($20 Mil minimum) unimaginable to us middle-class proles. It was all a country club inside thing, while the rest of us suckers were content to get our 3% IRA chump change. The irony, of course, is that the real suckers were Madoff's clients, people who greed and rapaciousness and rank stupidity led made them easy targets for the ultimate con man.
Who are the suckers now?
leftyrite
For forty years or more, I have been influenced and moved by the Jewish experience of the Holocaust and by
Jewish culture in general. So many bright lights have shaped my outlook on the world.
By what stretch of the imagination do Rubin, Fuld, Greenspan, and Madoff think that their behavior does not reflect upon their cultural identity? Their repulsive conduct will eventually launch a harsh, and wholly unfair, backlash. The question for me is: Did they ever learn anything themselves?
watapama
I predict Madoff will go down as a folk hero of the poor, the one who rendered the 'shot heard round the world' in 2008: Parties over...get REAL.
Perhaps he will emerge in a Robin Hood suit and tell us that he has given it all away to our poor, our hungry and our tired...
susquehannastudio
Not sure where the quote, "the poor you will always have with you," comes from. Now we have the "rich you will always have with you." The slick, well educated, bright and connected for whom getting rich by any means has become the goal too many admire. The clever money managers concocted schemes where they gave themselves millions of dollars, leaving empty promises of loans that no one can repay. We're looking at a morally bankrupt society.
Skyrider
"If it seems too good to be true,,,it probably is."
It's all about lessons. Some are just more expensive than others.
nobozos
Eat the rich, before they eat each other.
truthynesslover
the sec was warned in 1999 and did nothing.The auditors didnt audit and those responsible for over site of them did nothing.thers more to this than just bernie the con artist.
msdancer
with a name like made off..............what do you expect??????
elisabetta
Has anyone ever read Charles Dickens' "Little Dorritt"/ This same story of greed, and desire to be socially prominent, is told in that Victorian novel.
Eli
wndoom
"The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch goddess success. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success - is our national disease." William James (1843-1916)
lolalola
The quote "the poor you will always have with you" is from the New Testament. Jesus said it - adding to his disciples they would not always have Him.
This comment has been removed by The Daily Beast's editors.
MYWORLD5
THERE ARE SO MANY BILLIONS OF DOLLARS THAT HAVE BEEN "WALKED " AWAY WITH ........TAKE A LOOK AT THE LAST TWO YEARS ----------------AIG - ACORN - FANNIE MAE = FREDDIE MAC - WALL STREET - THERE IS MORE........, DODD .RAINES....OH WELL, WHY GO ON.... ALL OF WASHINGTON.......
THEY ARE STILL DIPPING......LOOK AT CHICAGO....
GET EVERYBODY OUT IN 2010
Yentah
Medoff is a Gonif [thief], a momzer [bastard] and a shonda [shame] for stealing from his own and from his own country club shtetl. My late mother would be shocked to learn that all those dollars that she worked hard to raise for Hadassah for sixty years bought diamonds for Bernie's wife.
Thank you.
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