The Swindlers

Bernie Madoff defrauded investors of 17.5 billion dollars.  Most of that amount has been recovered and paid to his victims as of 2021.  However, for many of the individuals, charities and other organizations that invested, there were years of pain and suffering;  many investors had put almost all their life savings into Madoff Investment Securities, believing they were making 12 percent annually.

Madoff's two sons died since the collapse of his company (suicide and cancer).  Madoff's health deteriorated in prison, and his request for compassionate release was denied.

Not all of Madoff's investors lost money before his company crashed.  Early investors were being paid from the investments of the fooled later investors in order to keep the scheme going.

The biggest paydays went to a Jeffry Picower, a total of 7.2 billion dollars.  Picower died in his swimming pool in 2009.  His death was ruled an accidental drowning caused by a massive heart attack. 

In 2010, his widow, Barbara Picower, returned the 7.2 billion to the government, the largest judicial forfeiture in U.S. history.

So far, the government and attorneys representing the Madoff victims have recovered more than 14 billion dollars.


Source... Forbes

Ponzi schemes fail when new investors stop coming and thus the early investors cannot be paid interest.

In the Madoff case, recession-battered investors were withdrawing hundreds of millions of dollars at a time in the autumn of 2009.  (townandcountrymag.com)

In Charles Ponzi's case, the public exposure of his deceit forced regulators to investigate and charge him.  This led to a run on his company as investors sought to recover their nest eggs.

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Charles Ponzi may have been inspired by the case of William "520 percent" Miller, a young Brooklyn, NY, bookkeeper who had remarkable success in fleecing investors in 1899, several years before Ponzi arrived in the United States.

Miller's scam netted him about a million dollars and several years behind bars.

Shortly before Ponzi's crimes were exposed, Miller -- interviewed by a New York newspaper -- expressed skepticism about Ponzi's mail-coupon-arbitrage business.


Source... Smithsonian Magazine

This is an interesting topic, for those that what more info have a read HERE

The whistleblower who early-on spotted and reported Bernie Madoff's perfidy is Harry Markopolos.

He is a math geek who was tasked by his employer, a competing hedge fund, to figure out how Madoff was so consistent and (supposedly) rarely lost money in the markets.

Markopolos filed numerous complaints against Madoff with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) starting in 2001, also alerting journalists and investment funds.

His calculations had indicated that Madoff Securities was defying the laws of mathematics and could not possibly be making all the transactions necessary to beat the market for so many years.

CBS News' 60 Minutes produced a profile on Markopolos in 2009 .. titled "The Man Who Knew," which is currently available online....

Search at YouTube.com... madoff markopolos 60 minutes rewind cbs

Markopolos has concluded that the scoundrel was able to escape earlier punishment by the SEC because the agency's investigators were lawyers and not financial experts.  In Markopolos's opinion, the SEC was strong on scrutinizing the verbiage in documents that Madoff's firm had submitted, though weak on figuring out that Madoff was massively defrauding his clients.

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I fail to have sympathy with the victims of such schemes. It's a fair punishment for sheer greed!
That said, neither are Miller, Ponzi, Madoff, etc. heroes. It is sad what money can make out of people!

Since Bernie Madoff's death, journalist Jim Campbell has published a book about how Madoff ran his con and how he rationalized it, based in part on lengthy correspondence between Madoff in prison and Campbell.  (Madoff died on April 14.)

In a CBS 60 Minutes piece late this month, Campbell calls Madoff a narcissist and a financial psychopath.

Campbell says the regulators who failed to corral Madoff over many years were grossly negligent.

Search on Youtube...  bernie madoff how he pulled it off 60 minutes

Campbell says he believes that Madoff's widow did not know her husband was a swindler before his empire collapsed.  Campbell and Ruth Madoff had lunch various times after Madoff went to prison, according to the 60 Minutes report.

The title of Campbell's book is Madoff Talks:  Uncovering the Untold Story Behind the Most Notorious Ponzi Scheme in History.  Publication date:  4/27/2021.

Bernie Madoff's life on Netflix.

Bernie Madoff, the biggest convicted swindler

in Wall Street history, is the subject of a

documentary series that debuted this week.

The title of this Netflix Series is

Madoff -- The Monster of Wall Street.

The highly-produced docuseries shows how

Madoff lived a double life from the very start

of his Manhattan career.

It reveals that Madoff's decision to plead

guilty after bilking investors of tens of

billions of dollars was a selfish act.  He had

loaned so much money to organized crime

that he feared he'd be targeted for a mob hit

if he didn't plead guilty instead of making a

settlement with the government.

The series also sheds light on the fact that

Madoff did not act alone.  In particular there

was his right-hand man, Frank Pascuali,

who died in 2015, years after Madoff's

Ponzi scheme was revealed.