In 2011, Bernie Madoff, the financier convicted of the biggest fraud in history, was six months into a 150-year jail sentence in the Federal Correctional Complex in Butner, NC, when he contacted journalist Richard Behar, thanking him for his condolence card after the death of his son Mark.
“That first email stated that Madoff was seeking to add me to his contacts list,” writes investigative reporter Behar in “Madoff: The Final Word” (Avid Reader Press). “I had the option of accepting or blocking him forever.
“In hindsight, I sometimes wish I’d chosen the latter.”
Over the course of the next decade, the men exchanged more than 300 emails, with Behar often sending Madoff money to pay for his Internet access in prison. There were dozens of handwritten letters, more than 50 telephone conversations and three in-person interviews as Behar set about writing his account of the Ponzi scheme that saw Madoff swindle investors out of some $68 billion.
At their first face-to-face meeting at Butner, Madoff ran through his daily routine, from working in the kitchens to reading books, Leon Uris’s 1953 novel “Battle Cry” being a favorite. Behar also brought a stack of quarters so Madoff could avail himself of the jail’s vending machine. “No, you have to do it,” he said to Behar. “I’ll have a Diet Coke.”
“Ouch,” writes Behar. “The greatest fraudster in history was not allowed to touch a coin. A billionaire who was once among the biggest market makers at the New York Stock Exchange not permitted now to get a soda for himself.”
The scale of the deception explained in “The Final Word” beggars belief. “Sixty-eight billion bucks, laid end to end in dollar bills, would encircle the Earth approximately 265 times. Now add another 104 circles to calculate the fraud’s value in today’s money: $100 billion, give or take a billion,” explains Behar.
“That’s nearly 2 million times what the average American worker earns in a year.”
At the time of his arrest on Dec. 11, 2008, Bernie Madoff had more than 4,900 active clients, with another 40,000 people whose investments had passed through Madoff’s company, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities (BLMIS).
In total, there was an estimated $68 billion of assets attributed to Madoff and his investments but, as Behar points out, there was actually less than $300 million left in his coffers. “Madoff made $68 billion disappear almost overnight,” he writes. “Bernie had engineered the greatest known fraud in human history.”
The victims were individuals and family trusts, colleges and charities, hedge funds and pension funds.
Even banks entrusted Madoff with their money.
Among the high-profile targets were movie maestro Steven Spielberg and entertainment mogul David Geffen, talk show host Larry King, actors Zsa Zsa Gabor, Kevin Bacon and John Malkovich and Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax.
The world’s richest woman, Liliane Bettencourt, was also conned, as well as the International Olympic Committee and some New York universities. “Those financially harmed — destroyed, in many cases — by Bernie reads like a Who’s Screwed Who in the sports, business, entertainment, academic, and philanthropic worlds,” writes Behar.
Madoff didn’t care who he defrauded.
When Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize for Peace winner Elie Wiesel entrusted him with the money of his Foundation for Humanity, the non-profit organization nearly went under, losing $15 million.
Wiesel and his wife, Marion, also lost their life savings of $12 million. “We thought he was God, we trusted everything in his hands,” said Wiesel, whose mother and sister were gassed on arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944.
When Behar asked Madoff about whether he had any regrets about Wiesel, he simply replied: “He’s full of shit, that guy.”
In Behar’s account, the disgraced financier also reveals how he turned down sports icons like Michael Jordan and Derek Jeter, despite approaches from their financial advisors, and how Donald Trump, in his 2009 book ‘Think Like a Champion: An Informal Education in Business and Life’, claims he saw through Madoff.
Not so, Madoff told Behar. “You know, he claimed that he never invested with me, which is true. And he said that I approached him, which is not true. I never approached him for anything,” he said.
“You know, that’s typical Trump, to say he was smart enough not to invest.”
Over the course of his conversations, however, Behar found a man who was capable of contrition. “What I did was terrible. I’ll never forgive myself,” he told him. “But it’s not like I planned it. If I did, I would have done it better.”
Madoff was also adamant what happened simply wasn’t the real him. “I know it’s hard to imagine, but I’m not a gambler,” Madoff told Behar. “I never played cards. Never bought lottery tickets.”
The problem for Madoff was two-fold.
On one hand, there were the clients who never carried out due diligence. “That kind of blind faith is a Ponzi scammer’s lifeblood,” writes Behar.
The other issue was that as events outstripped him, it left him with no way out of the giant hole he had dug for himself by taking so much money from friends, relatives, and strangers.
Madoff was in too deep – and it took its toll. “After a while, you start bullshitting yourself to believe what you want to believe. And then you just block it out of your mind. I was going nuts,” he told Behar.
“Sixteen years of doing this [Ponzi]. Not telling your wife and sons. I don’t know how I stood the stress. I woke up every morning for sixteen years feeling I’m not coming out of it.
“I was hoping for some kind of miracle.”
Madoff’s duplicity also impacted his family.
On the second anniversary of his father’s arrest, Madoff’s oldest son Mark, 46, who worked at BLMIS but never faced criminal charges, hanged himself with his dog’s leash as his 2-year-old son, Nicholas, slept in a neighboring room in his Manhattan apartment.
Further tragedy followed in September 2014 when Madoff’s other son, Andrew, died from cancer, aged 48.
Diagnosed with lymphoma in 2003, his cancer went into remission but returned in 2011, something Andrew Madoff attributed to stress caused by his father’s arrest. “They believed in me; they looked at me a certain way, and then all of a sudden they felt betrayed, and I understand that,” Madoff told Behar by phone.
Richard Behar would speak with Madoff for over 10 years. “Bernie said often that he was counting on my book to set things straight and was upset that I still hadn’t published it after a decade of work.
“He complained in an email that he’d probably be dead by the time it came out.”
And so it came to pass.
After suffering with chronic kidney disease for several years, Bernie Madoff died at Butner’s Federal Medical Center on April 14, 2021.
He was 82.
Shortly after his death, Behar sent Madoff another email “curious whether it would just vanish into the bowels of Butner, or if I’d receive a response”.
He did get a reply, albeit automated.
“Inmate 61727054 — MADOFF, BERNARD L no longer has access to the Trust Fund Limited Inmate Computer System; therefore, he/she may not send or receive messages.”
The reply amused Behar. “The email seemed to suggest that Bernie was still out there somewhere, bumming quarters, a tattered Leon Uris novel in his pocket,” he writes.
“In fact, he is nothing but ashes.”
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