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The Best of Bernie
Bernie’s Victims
- On the list: Two professional sports franchise owners; two of the founding partners of DreamWorks; one Nobel Laureate; one United States senator; one hedge fund manager who became wealthy enough that he posed with his five daughters for a Vanity Fair spread (“Golden in Greenwich”).
- Hadassah, the Zionist women's group that touts itself as the largest volunteer organization in America, lost $90 million.
- Madoff fleeced Yeshiva University for up to $110 million, even while he sat on their board and served as chairman of their business school.
- Some non-profits have been entirely obliterated by Madoff. The JEHT Foundation, an advocacy group for criminal justice reform, announced it would shutter its doors after donors revealed its funds were tied up in Madoff's scheme.
- E-mail from a Madoff victim. "My elderly mother had ALL her life savings invested with this guy. she is of course distraught and i am worried for her health. please can you provide some guidance—where the investors should turn to at this point? what should they do???"
Unsolved Leads
- Bernie’s accountant, Daniel Friehling, worked upstate, in New City, and only showed up at his 13-by-18 office for 10 to 15 minutes at a time, according to a neighbor. Friehling drives cars with the vanity plates “FTROOP” and “145CPA.”
- Is Madoff the Thomas Pynchon of investment bankers? A photographer for Barron’s had a hard time finding a photo of Bernie. “It was as if the guy didn't exist in the 21st century.”
The Final Insults
- Madoff was shoved around by news photographers Wednesday after a court appearance.
- Donald Trump is calling Madoff a “sleazebag” and a “total crook.” He also implied that Madoff’s sons might have might have been in on the scheme.
- On Dec. 14, a neighbor saw Madoff sitting in his window, smoking a cigar at 3 a.m. His wife, Ruth, “came and cradled his head in her arms.”
Ben Crair is an editorial assistant at The Daily Beast. Benjamin Sarlin is a reporter for The Daily Beast. He previously covered New York City politics for The New York Sun and has worked for talkingpointsmemo.com.
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Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
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Benjamin Sarlin is a reporter for The Daily Beast. He previously covered New York City politics for The New York Sun and has worked for talkingpointsmemo.com.
Essentially, isn't what the Federal Gov't doing with all the bailouts a giant Ponzi scheme?
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?
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?
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...
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.
"If it seems too good to be true,,,it probably is."
It's all about lessons. Some are just more expensive than others.
Eat the rich, before they eat each other.
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.
with a name like made off..............what do you expect??????
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
"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)
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.
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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
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.
Why don't they ever learn? History is full of examples about these people, they keep doing the same thing over and over again, Russia, France, Germany and now the USA!
Why are Jews doing bad somehow worse than Christians doing bad? Madoff, a thief and fraud, merits a lifetime in jail but he didn't send thousands to their death and burn thru $900 billion in taxpayer funds as have Bush and Cheney done. They will never see the punishment they deserve except perhaps when they meet their maker.
what people???
don't blame a nation for what a few did...shouldnt you be beyond that vankuyk?
where's all the money going?
jaypet-What people??All of them.How do you suppose they got all that money that was pilfered.You sound naieve as hell.
Thank you.
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