Wall Street Crime And Punishment: The Mystery Of Bernie Madoff

Does crime pay?

Wall Street Crime and Punishment is a weekly series by Benzinga's Phil Hall chronicling the bankers, brokers and financial ne’er-do-wells whose ambition and greed take them in the wrong direction.

Bernie Madoff was not a larger-than-life personality. Except for the decision to wear his hair on the longish side in the manner of an aging rock musician, there was nothing in his demeanor and behavior that secured immediate attention. Truly, one could easily pass him in a crowded store aisle or stand beside him in a time-consuming elevator ride and not be aware of his presence.

And this lack of the superstar vibe made Madoff’s actions all the more unlikely. As the man who orchestrated the largest Ponzi scheme in history — a $64.8 billion swindle that defrauded more than 40,000 people in 125 countries over four decades — the quotidian Madoff seemed closer to Hannah Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil than the pop-culture concept of the charismatic yet deranged genius eager to obliterate the world for amusement’s sake.

Indeed, there was no genius in Madoff’s madness. His reign of wreckage was not a tribute to cunning and planning, but to the dumb luck that the federal regulators who were supposed to be on alert for such shenanigans were clueless until too much damage was done.

A Sort-Of Self-Made Man: Bernard Lawrence Madoff was born in Brooklyn on April 29, 1938, and was raised in the Laurelton section of Queens. His father was an entrepreneur who had the Midas touch in reverse: every endeavor he put his hands on failed. Nonetheless, Madoff admired his father’s desire to be self-employed.

Madoff entered the University of Alabama in the 1956-57 semester. According to Madoff biographer Jerry Oppenheimer, Madoff chose this school because he was unable to get accepted anywhere else. After a year at the school, Madoff transferred back to Hofstra University in Long Island, which was closer to both his family and to Ruth Alpern, whom he met during a summer job as a lifeguard, and the two married in 1959.

Madoff graduated from Hofstra in 1960 and briefly attended law school, but dropped out to pursue his own business. Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities was bootstrapped with money Madoff earned from his work as a lifeguard and as a part-time lawn sprinkler installer, plus a $50,000 loan from his father-in-law, who ran an accounting firm and encouraged clients to do business with Madoff.

But within two years of launching his business, the so-called “Kennedy Slide” bear market put Madoff’s start-up in peril and he needed another cash infusion from his father-in-law to stay independently employed.

Madoff initially focused his attention on the penny stock market, later recalling to New York magazine journalist Steve Fishman, “We were a small firm, we weren't a member of the New York Stock Exchange — it was very obvious.” Still, Madoff was willing to build his reputation and client base on the fringes of Wall Street, recalling that he happily filled a transaction involving the sale of eight bonds — a minuscule task that no major brokerage would consider but which he gladly fulfilled.

“I was perfectly happy to take the crumbs,” he stated.

Related Link: The complete Wall Street Crime and Punishment series

Taking A Byte: To his credit, Madoff was ahead of the curve in detecting investment trends. He successfully made inroads into the institutional investor space when most of Wall Street was still fixated on retail investors, and in the early 1970s he embraced computer technology at a time when the financial services industry maintained a fetal-level dependency on paper, particularly the so-called “pink sheets” that disseminated prices for over-the-counter stocks on the cerise-hued documents.

Madoff’s firm was among the first participants in the nascent screen-based electronic market that evolved into NASDAQ, and his prescience would later be rewarded by serving as NASDAQ’s non-executive chairman in 1990, 1991 and 1993. He would later serve as board chairman of the National Association of Securities Dealers.

By 1975, Madoff’s fortunes were solidified when federal deregulation abolished fixed commissions and enabled the rise of the discount brokerage. Madoff aggressively seized on this opportunity and within a decade he was making $100 million a year and upgraded his lifestyle to include a Manhattan penthouse apartment, a mansion in the swanky Long Island resort of Montauk, other mansions in Palm Beach and along the French Riviera, a yacht for his French-based sojourns and two private jets.

He also gained industry respect for his philanthropy and notability for his donations to high-profile politicians. But the truth of his wealth was slowly creating a poison that would create untold havoc.

The Phantom Empire: Just when Madoff began his Ponzi scheme is uncertain. Madoff claimed that it began in response to the recession in the early 1990s while federal prosecutors traced his chicanery to the early 1970s.

For the longest time, Madoff did not generate any attention from regulators, and he didn’t pop on the SEC’s radar until 1992 when two accountants who previously worked for his father-in-law’s firm were charged with selling unregistered securities that provided investors with 13.5% to 20% in returns.

The investigation found the money was managed by Madoff, who claimed he was unaware of its shady origins and insisted he was not running an investment-advisory business but was only managing accounts for hedge funds.

The SEC inexplicably went no further with Madoff on that probe, but there would be seven additional investigations by that agency and other regulators over the next 16 years. Most of the attention paid to Madoff concentrated on the weirdly consistent high returns that his firm claimed to generate — which was made all the more curious by his claims of adhering to safe investments in blue-chip stocks that somehow always brought in 10% to 20% returns in both bull and bear market cycles.

Even Madoff acknowledged the ridiculousness of his alleged wizardry, later telling New York magazine's Fishman, “How can you be making 15 or 18% when everyone is making less money?”

In reality, Madoff didn’t invest in the blue-chip stocks. He deposited his client’s funds into a bank account and provided payouts to clients seeking investment redemptions by withdrawing the account’s funds.

Over time, Madoff’s firm began managing money from an amazing array of deep-pocketed clients: European and Asian banks, New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon, baseball legend Sandy Koufax, the global charity Hadassah, Luxembourg’s royal family, Hollywood stars including Kevin Bacon, John Malkovich and Zsa Zsa Gabor, charitable foundations run by filmmaker Steven Spielberg and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, and schools including New York University, Yeshiva University and Bard College.

Madoff even hoodwinked the Wall Street Journal, which profiled him in 1992 and observed how he calmly explained that his “returns were really nothing special, given that the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index generated an average annual return of 16.3% between November 1982 and November 1992.”

Because Madoff was constantly attracting high-worth clients, the bank account was never lacking in funds. But not everyone was easily tricked, especially financial analyst Harry Markopolos, who filed an SEC complaint in 2000. Markopolos accused Madoff of running “the world's largest Ponzi scheme” and observed that Madoff continued to make profits while the S&P was losing money. He also pointed to Madoff Securities’ use of “undisclosed commissions” rather than the standard hedge fund fee of 1% of the total plus 20% of the profits.

The SEC initially ignored Markopolos but finally sought clarification from Madoff on two separate occasions in 2005. Despite an examination of his paperwork and interviews with Madoff and his executive team, the regulator’s investigations determined there was no fraud and considered the matter closed.

The Party’s Over: While the SEC couldn’t shake fault with Madoff, the Great Recession did. The collapse of the global economy brought nearly everyone to their knees, except for Madoff’s firm, which was claiming year-to-date returns of 5.6% in November 2008 while the S&P 500 plummeted by 39% over the same period.

As the economic crisis grew more dire, Madoff’s clients began demanding investment redemptions, but the bank account at the source of his trickery could not accommodate the rush for cash. With no Plan B to save himself, Madoff decided to turn over the proverbial new leaf and become honest about how he conducted himself.

On Dec. 10, 2008, Madoff met with sons Mark and Andrew Madoff, who worked as senior managers in his firm’s trading operations, and acknowledged the Ponzi scheme that he pulled and revealed that he was hoping to secure additional funds in order to compensate his employees and wind down operations.

The younger Madoffs were appalled at what they learned and immediately contacted federal investigators. The FBI raided Madoff’s office the next day and arrested him at his penthouse apartment — he was still in pajamas when he was put into custody.

In combing through Madoff’s records, the SEC investigators finally located the truth behind the scam: Madoff’s regulatory statements claimed he had only 23 accounts when in reality there were more than 4,000. The high-profile clients who were duped by Madoff became public knowledge, which further raised the media frenzy surrounding the story.

To the surprise of many, Madoff was willing to plead guilty to the 11 charges brought against him without raising the hint of striking a plea deal. He would state that he was solely responsible for what transpired and that neither his sons, his brother Peter Madoff (who was the firm’s chief compliance officer) or his wife Ruth (who formerly worked as his bookkeeper) knew anything of what transpired.

Madoff entered his guilty plea on March 12, 2009, and was sentenced three months later to the maximum punishment of 150 years in prison, along with the requirement to pay a $170 billion restitution.

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A Troubling Denouement: If Madoff believed his legal sacrifice would spare others from justice, he was incredibly wrong. His brother Peter pleaded guilty to securities fraud and falsifying records and was sentenced to 10 years in prison, while five former Madoff assistants were convicted of aiding the fraud: two escaped prison terms and one died before he was to be sentenced.

Madoff’s sons were never implicated in their father’s crimes, but the grief and pain it created damaged them. Mark Madoff attempted suicide in 2009 and succeeded in 2010 at the age of 46, while his brother Andrew’s health suffered: a lymphoma condition that went into remission in 2003 came back due to the stress of the scandal and he died in 2014 at the age of 48.

Madoff’s widow would always insist she was completely unaware of her husband pulled a historic Ponzi scheme, even claiming at one point that she had no idea what a Ponzi scheme was until he broke the news to her. As part of his guilty plea, Madoff arranged for Ruth to forfeit $80 million worth of assets they accumulated from his ill-gotten gains while she would retain $2.5 million. She is now living in a condo in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, and has refused to speak with the media. All of her grandchildren had their Madoff surname legally changed.

To date, a court-appointed trustee recovered more than $13 billion of the estimated $17.5 billion that investors entrusted with Madoff’s business.

Madoff gave a few interviews during his imprisonment. Over the years, he seesawed between remorse and incredulity, offering rueful comments on how his actions destroyed his family yet also insisting at one point that he allowed himself “to be talked into something and that's my fault,” as if he was also the victim of a con job.

Yet Madoff could also be brutally tactless when confronted with the results of his lies. Upon learning the news that French banker Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, who invested over $1 billion of his clients’ money with Madoff, killed himself after discovering the severity of his losses, shrugged and replied, “That guy couldn’t pick a stock if his life depended on it.”

Madoff’s prison years were marked by failing health, but a clemency appeal by his attorneys to President Donald Trump in 2019 was rejected. He died on April 14, 2021, at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina, at the age of 82.

The ultimate mystery behind Madoff was could be encapsulated in a single-word question: Why? As he would belatedly admit, he couldn't offer a solution.

“I had more than enough money to support any of my lifestyle and my family's lifestyle,” he wondered. “I didn't need to do this for that. I don't know why.”

Photo: Thierry Ehrmann / Flickr Creative Commons.