Bernard Madoff
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Bernard Madoff is former chairman of NASDAQ, as well as the founder and chairman of venerable financial corporation Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC. That is, until Dec 11, 2008, when he was arrested in connection with the world's single largest incidence of investor fraud. Ever. Turns out he had been running a $50 billion scam, over the course of 30 years. Not even Danny Ocean could pull off that kind of heist, no matter how much of a prick Andy Garcia was to him.
The day prior to his arrest, Madoff reportedly admitted to his top-ranking executives that the company’s management and advisory division was “a giant Ponzi scheme.” Of course, mistakenly thinking he’d said “Fonzie” scheme, and, looking forward to the part with the shark and the water skis, senior staff did nothing after hearing this revelation. Just what kind of a dick is Bernard Madoff? His two sons were the ones who tipped off the FBI.
Along the way to bilking his clients out of more than 500 times the annual payroll for the New York Yankees, Bernard Madoff is directly responsible for the collapse of several international banks, the suicide of one prominent investor, and the decimation of several high-profile humanitarian organizations, on some of whose boards he served as treasurer. Talk about chutzpah.
In this way, Bernard Madoff really isn’t helping a certain ethnicity dispel the common stereotype concerning it and money.
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Personal Life
Bernard Madoff began specifically targeting and then destroying prominent world health, education, and criminal justice philanthropies from his birth on April 29, 1938, a birthday he shares with Jerry Seinfeld, the lead guitarist from Great White, the chick who played Jan in The Brady Bunch, the nutjob who gets mauled by bears in Grizzly Man, Master P, the fat Wilson-Phillip, and Barbaro. Talk about an auspicious day in numerology.
Born in Queens, New York—a borough of New York City predominately populated by Asians, grandmothers, and Run DMC—Madoff graduated from Far Rockaway High School, which has produced such esteemed alumni as Dr. Joyce Brothers and MC Serch. You know, from that crappy white hip-hop group 3rd Bass? They did that song “Pop Goes the Weasel”… You know, ‘cause the weasel goes “pop”? Ah, forget it.
In 1960, Bernard Madoff graduated with a dick degree—or “dickgree”—in political science from Hofstra College. Immediately upon finishing school, Bernard Madoff founded his own securities exchange firm. In so doing, he gave the very first hints of the full dickishness he would eventually come to exhibit. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as “dickshadowing.”
Madoff is married to high school sweetheart Ruth Madoff and has two back-stabbing sons, Mark and Andrew. He owns a lavish home on the Upper East Side—a neighborhood with perhaps the highest dick-to-non-dick ratio in Manhattan—and maintains an ocean-front home in Montauk, a summer weekend destination especially popular with the variety of dick that sails around in an obnoxiously-named yacht, most likely while wearing a several hundred dollar shirt in some shade of pink. Oh, yeah, Madoff also owns an obnoxiously-named yacht. And, one presumes, many pink shirts.
Career
Bernard Madoff started his firm in 1960 with an initial investment of $5,000 (about $35,000 in today’s dollars, though probably a lot less in tomorrow’s dollars, and probably even less the day after tomorrow). He claims he earned this start-up cash from working as a lifeguard and installing sprinklers, though in all likelihood he probably pried open more than a few tzedakah boxes in synagogues throughout the tri-state area.
Interestingly enough, Bernard Madoff has been an active and longstanding member of the National Association of Securities Dealers, a self-regulatory organization for the U.S. securities industry. That one sentence entirely sums up the need for outside oversight, if not straight-up federal regulation.
While fraud in the investment management and advisory division may have been going on since the 1970s, Madoff also had the kreplach to run a legitimate division right alongside it. That legitimate branch pioneered a practice known as “paying for order flow.” These legal kickbacks, combined with honest-to-goodness white collar crime, made Madoff Securities one of the nation’s top securities traders.
Madoff Securities was housed on three floors of the Lipstick Building, so named because it also served as the location for that first Charles Gibson interview with Sarah Palin. The hedge fund division took up the entire 17th floor. Despite the fact that the space was large enough for hundreds of employees, and the fund was supposedly managing billions of dollars in investments, none of the 20 people who worked there thought it was weird that only 20 people worked there, although in their defense, 15 of those people were holograms.
Affected Clients
Because Bernard Madoff Securities had been promising substantial returns year in and year out, even after the stock market took a giant crap in the fall of 2008, its client list boasts a wide variety of rich suckers.
Since Madoff was himself Jewish and on the board of directors of several prominent Jewish institutions, he sat in prime position to rub elbows with the rich and circumcised. His clients included Jeffrey Katzenberg, Eliot Spitzer, and Steven Spielberg, as well as Yeshiva University and the Elie Wiesel Foundation, which lost almost all of its assets.
This type of scheme, which targets members of a particular religious group, is known as affinity fraud. As such, many leaders within the Jewish community have publicly excoriated Madoff for having broken a cardinal Jewish dictate: Thou shalt not steal (but if thou must, only from the goyim).
Bernard Madoff’s victims also included France’s top investment bank Natixis, France’s top consumer bank BNP Paribas, and France’s top insurance firm AXA. In so doing, he dealt a serious blow to the French, so, you know, at least he’s got that going for him.
Exactly what he did
Is extremely difficult both to explain and to understand without an advanced degree in economics. None of us have one, but needless to say he stole lots of people's money and should rot in hell.
Exactly what happens now
He is under house arrest until his indictment, expected by mid-March 2009. Bernard Madoff will lose his obnoxiously-named yacht. They’ll probably let him keep the pink shirts.
