Celebrity Hit Man

AP Photo Unauthorized biographer Jerry Oppenheimer’s latest target is the Ponzi king, and as The Daily Beast’s Sandra McElwaine finds out, prison may be a breeze compared to this treatment.

Jerry Oppenheimer is a super-sleuth who loves to dish. For twenty years, the self-styled “investigative biographer” has been ferreting out the peccadilloes and foibles of the famous, the infamous, the powerful and the supremely well-to-do. He is a raconteur extraordinaire and an interview with the dogged reporter can rapidly turn into a delicious gabfest. Who else can serve up tasty morsels about Martha Stewart, Anna Wintour, Paris Hilton, and is more than willing to share?

Skewering high-wattage females is his shtick. “I like to write about iconic women,” he explains. “Everybody is interested in them and they really sell books…”

Click Here to Read an Excerpt from Madoff With the Money

He has veered from this formula only twice: once to delve into the private world of Jerry Seinfeld in Seinfeld: The Making of an American Icon, which was not a success even though the comedian had a highly rated show and a huge audience. The fans were “interested only in the show, not the man,” he says.

His second departure is his current take on master swindler Bernie Madoff, Madoff With the Money, which is serialized in The Daily Beast this week. Employing good old-fashioned shoe leather, Oppenheimer went back to Madoff’s roots in Queens, New York to reveal a huckster even in high school, a life-long liar and cheat. As the mind-boggling Ponzi scheme collapsed in December 2008, Oppenheimer was wrapping up his most recent exposé on the legendary Barbie doll and the nefarious dealings of the world famous Mattel company inToy Monster. Although he was on the road pushing this work, he dropped everything to take on Madoff and “jumped right in.”

On February 1, he began interviewing more than 100 of the felon’s associates, friends, and family, and within six months produced a 90,000-word manuscript. “It was the biggest white-collar crime ever in history,” he enthuses—and a story he simply couldn’t resist.

Madoff with the Money By Jerry Oppenheimer 272 pages. Wiley. $24.95. Oppenheimer, a Philadelphia native, started his career as copy boy at the Philadelphia Inquirer, and moved on the to the Washington Star as an investigative reporter, sometimes butting heads with Carl Bernstein while covering the ins and outs of Watergate. It was at the National Enquirer in the late 1980s that he cut his teeth on celebrity journalism, writing about heartthrob Rock Hudson, who was deep in the closet and desperately trying to disguise his homosexuality and subsequent battle with AIDS. This story morphed into a book, Idol, Rock Hudson. It sold well. Oppenheimer had found his métier.

His next target: Barbara Walters. “It was the ultimate unauthorized biography,” he states. “I loved doing Barbara. She was a big star. Still is.”

He then set his sights on the Kennedy clan and the dysfunctional family of Bobby’s wife Ethel in The Other Mrs. Kennedy. “There were so many Kennedys. Nobody had focused on Ethel and the bizarreness of her family, the Skakels.”