He December 11, 2008 One of the biggest financial scandals in the history of Wall Street broke out in the United States: Bernie Madoffa market titan and prominent New York financial advisor, was at the center of media and judicial attention when he was identified as the person responsible for a scam that reached 65,000 million dollars.
His own sons, Mark and Andrew, were the ones who turned him over to the authorities. Two days before, on the night of December 9, Madoff gathered them at a dinner with his wife, Ruth, to confess his truth: The family fortune he had amassed was nothing more than a ponzi scheme. Indeed, Madoff used funds from new investors to pay older onescreating the appearance of stable and exceptional returns. But the illusion, sustained for decades, finally burst into pieces.
It was during the economic recession of 2008: with the real estate bubble burst caused by the Great Recession, a run on investors was generated and Madoff did not have the funds to pay them. The requests for “withdrawals” totaled 7,000 million dollars and he barely had 300 million to respond. And in the midst of the biggest crisis after the “Crack del 29″he also couldn’t get new clients. From one day to the next, His financial empire collapsed and was the cover of all the newspapers.
Bernard Lawrence Madoff was born on April 29, 1938 in QueensNew York, within a middle-class Jewish family. His financial career began in 1960 when he was just 22 years old: with $5,000 he earned working as a lifeguard on the beaches of Long Island and a loan from his father-in-law, he founded Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securitiesa firm that initially focused on buying and selling stocks for clients, but ultimately positioned itself as one of the most influential on Wall Street.
According to him, the fraud began in the 1990s, after facing poor investment results. It started as “a temporary solution,” but was transformed into a structure whose collapse not only left thousands of investors in ruinbut also hit charitable institutions, such as the Steven Spielberg Foundationand school teachers, farmers, mechanics and retirees, who entrusted part of their assets to Madoff’s false promises.
During the trial in Manhattan Federal Court, Madoff pleaded guilty to eleven chargesincluding fraud, money laundering and theft of pension plans. “I am ashamed and deeply sorry. I cannot adequately express how sorry I am for what I have done. “I have left a legacy of shame to my family and my grandchildren,” he told the judge on March 12, 2009.
I was then wearing fourteen months of house arrest in his luxurious Penthouse on New York’s Upper East Side; but, after the sentence—three months later, received a sentence of 150 years— was transferred to a common prison.
During his statement, Madoff also took the opportunity to make clear his family’s innocence. He said that his wife, Ruthknew nothing of his maneuvers, and that his sons Mark and Andrew, neitheralthough both worked as directors of one of their companies, the legal one, the one on the floor above. He assured that they had never been on the floor below, the one that was full of papers and old computers, from where he had carried out the biggest scam in the country’s financial history.
The collapse of Madoff’s Ponzi scheme became a human tragedy of unprecedented proportions. For some of his victims, the ruin was unbearable. So much so that, just ten days after the fraud came to light, Thierry de la Villehucheta French investor who had entrusted him with most of his resources, took his own life in his New York office. Two months later, the British William Foxtona former officer of the Order of the British Empire, he shot himself in the head in a park near his home in Southampton. He had lost his entire family’s savings..
However, the most emblematic deaths were those of his own children, Mark y Andrew Madoff. Markwho reported his father to the FBI along with his brother, was never able to escape the accusations that pointed him out as an accomplice to the fraud. On December 11, 2010, exactly two years after Bernie’s arrest, he took his own life in his Manhattan apartment, leaving his young son sleeping in the next room.
Andrewfor his part, died in 2014 after a long battle against lymphoma, an illness that he himself attributed to the stress and shame derived from his father’s actions. Even so, he had the strength to write a book, “Truth and Consequences.” In his presentation he said that there was no way to justify the damage his father caused to so many people and that, personally, I couldn’t forgive him.
“I didn’t suspect anything. I grew up seeing how people treated him like a legend. Everyone saw him as an investor with spectacular talent, It never occurred to me that he was a fake.“he also said in an interview with the network NBC. He also said that he read the letters that his father sent him from prison, but that he found no “sincerity or remorse” in them.
During Christmas 2008, just two weeks after Bernie Madoff’s arrest, he and his wife Ruth, desperate and under house arrest, they took “a handful of pills” with the intention of ending their lives. However, the dose was not lethal, and they both woke up the next morning.
After Mark’s suicide, Ruth—the only one who came to visit him at Butner Correctional Facility in North Carolina— she broke all contact with her husband and moved to Connecticut to care for Andrew until his death. Currently, little is known about his life. The last thing that emerged was that settled in Old Greenwichabout 60 kilometers from New York, in a house for which he pays $2,900 a month. For now, she is not going through hardships: justice authorized her to keep two and a half million of the family fortune, amassed with her ex-husband’s scams.
Bernie Madoff died on April 14, 2021, at age 82in a common prison, victim of a kidney failure. Although he requested to spend his last days under house arrest, the justice system denied him that privilege. “It was a compassion he never had for his victims.”commented one of the prosecutors.
His miserable end left a dark legacy: the biggest financial fraud in historya disintegrated family, and a moral vacuum that continues to question the world of high finance.
