The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust (44 page)

Dominic Ambrosino, a retired New York City corrections officer, squeezed out of a crowded bench near the front. He described the life-altering decisions people had made because they believed their money was safe. His pension payout, his retirement, the proceeds from his and his wife’s sale of their house, their purchase of a motor home to pursue a dream of travel—all were decisions they could not undo, decisions made only because they had trusted Madoff.

Maureen Ebel, the petite sixty-one-year-old widow who spoke at the plea hearing, aimed her first arrows at the SEC, which, “by its total incompetence and criminal negligence, has allowed a psychopath to steal from me and steal from the world.” She was now working three jobs and had sold her home and many of her possessions. “The emotional toll that this has taken on me has been devastating,” she said.

Multiple jobs were all that sustained Thomas Fitzmaurice and his wife, both sixty-three. Madoff “cheated his victims out of their money so that he and his wife Ruth and their two sons could live a life of luxury beyond belief,” he said—a life “normally reserved for royalty, not for common thieves.”

Fitzmaurice read his wife’s message to Madoff. Her children have provided “constant love and support,” she wrote. “You, on the other hand, Mr. Madoff, have two sons that despise you. Your wife, rightfully so, has been vilified and shunned by her friends in the community. You have left your children a legacy of shame. I have a marriage made in heaven. You have a marriage made in hell, and that is where you, Mr. Madoff, are going to return.”

Carla Hirschhorn described the loss of her daughter’s college tuition fund in the middle of her junior year and the frantic uncertainty of how to pay bills. “Since December 11, life has been a living hell,” she said. “It feels like a nightmare we can’t wake from.”

Sharon Lissauer, a fragile blond model in a pale summery dress, was near tears before she began. She had trusted Madoff with everything, and he stole everything. “He has ruined so many people’s lives,” she said in a soft, oddly gentle voice. “He killed my spirit and shattered my dreams. He destroyed my trust in people. He destroyed my life.”

Burt Ross, a charismatic elderly man supporting himself on two walking sticks, tallied his losses at $5 million. He then eloquently addressed Madoff’s life. “What can we possibly say about Madoff?” he asked. That he was a philanthropist? “The money he gave to charities he stole.” A good family man? “He leaves his grandchildren a name that mortifies them.” That he was a righteous Jew? “Nobody has done more to reinforce the ugly stereotype that all we care about is money.” Ross invoked Dante’s
Inferno
and condemned Madoff to the lowest circle of hell.

A young man named Michael Schwartz explained that part of a trust fund Madoff had stolen from his family had been “set aside to take care of my twin brother who is mentally disabled.” He concluded: “I only hope his prison sentence is long enough so that his jail cell becomes his coffin.”

The next speaker was Miriam Siegman, who repeated a wish made during Madoff’s plea hearing—that he be publicly tried, that the full truth come out in a courtroom before a jury, that he acknowledge “the murderous effects” of a crime that had already driven a few people to suicide.

The final speaker was Sheryl Weinstein, a well-spoken accountant and the former chief financial officer of Hadassah. In two months, her pale heart-shaped face framed by sleek blond hair would be on the cover of a memoir she was secretly writing, in which she would claim to have had a brief extramarital affair with Bernie Madoff. On this day, she said, “I felt it was important for somebody who was personally acquainted with Madoff to speak.” She described “this beast who I called Madoff. He walks among us. He dresses like us. He drives and eats and drinks and speaks. Under the façade, there is truly a beast.”

It was a wrenching recital, punctuated by soft sobs and steadied by anger. Whether eloquent or clumsy, each victim testified to a profound sense of betrayal—by Madoff, by the SEC, by the courts, by life.

In an earnest tone, Judge Chin thanked them and tilted his head: “Mr. Sorkin?”

The defense counsel, under the circumstances, is often little but a diversion between acts. Who could defend the man who caused all the heartbreak that had mesmerized the courtroom for nearly an hour? Yet, somehow, Sorkin had to try.

“We cannot be unmoved by what we have heard,” he said. “There is no way we cannot be sensitive to the victims’ suffering. This is a tragedy, as some of the victims have said, at every level…. We represent a deeply flawed individual—but we represent, Your Honor, a human being.”

Sorkin closed simply by urging a sentence free of vengeance, free of rage. “We ask only, Your Honor, that Mr. Madoff be given understanding and fairness.”

Now it was time for act two, Bernie Madoff himself.

He had a prepared speech, like his statement in March, but this one sounded more authentically like the man who existed before December 11, 2008.

“Your Honor, I cannot offer you any excuse for my behavior,” he began, facing the judge. “How do you excuse betraying thousands of investors who entrusted me with their life savings? How do you excuse deceiving 200 employees who have spent most of their working life working for me? How do you excuse lying to a brother and two sons who have spent their whole adult life helping to build a successful and respected business?”

There was a breath-long pause. “How do you excuse lying and deceiving a wife who stood by you for 50 years—and still stands by you?”

He inched toward a smudged sketch of what he had done. “I believed when I started this problem—this crime—that it would be something I would be able to work my way out of, but that became impossible. The harder I tried, the deeper I dug myself into a hole.” He was accustomed to making trading mistakes, he said. They were part of his business; he could forgive himself for those. But he had made more than a mistake in this instance, he’d made “a terrible error in judgment. I refused to accept the fact—could
not
accept the fact that for once in my life, I had failed. I couldn’t admit that failure and that was a tragic mistake.”

On paper, his words seemed deeply remorseful, although they were delivered in a bleak, leaden voice: “I am responsible for a great deal of suffering and pain. I understand that. I live in a tormented state now, knowing of all the pain and suffering I have created. I left a legacy of shame, as some of my victims have pointed out, to my family and grandchildren. That’s something I will live with for the rest of my life.”

He tried, too late, to repair the damage caused by months of standing mute. “People have accused me of being silent and not being sympathetic. That is not true,” he said. “People have accused my wife of being silent and not being sympathetic. Nothing could be further from the truth. She cries herself to sleep every night knowing of all the pain and suffering I have caused—and I am tormented by that, as well.”

He said that he and Ruth had remained silent on the advice of their attorneys. But he added that Ruth would release a written statement later in the day expressing her anguish and sympathy for his victims. “I ask you to listen to that,” Madoff said. “She is sincere, and all I ask [of] you is to listen to her.”

In a way, the sheer impossibility of making anything better or different seemed to suck the life out of his final sentences. He almost acknowledged this: “Nothing I can say will correct the things that I have done…. There is nothing I can do that will make anyone feel better.”

He concluded: “But I will live with this pain, with this torment, for the rest of my life. I apologize to my victims”—and now he abruptly turned in place and looked at the crowded courtroom, his face haggard with deep gray triangles under his eyes—“I will turn and face you and say I am sorry. I know that doesn’t help you.”

He turned back to the bench. “Your Honor, thank you for listening to me.” He sat down.

The government’s case, too, was a short familiar solo before the final act. Everyone knew that the prosecutors wanted a sentence of 150 years; they had laid out their reasons in a memo made public a few days earlier. “For more than 20 years, he stole ruthlessly and without remorse,” said Lisa Baroni, one of the prosecutors. “Thousands of people placed their trust in him and he lied repeatedly to all of them.”

But the climax in this drama could come only from Judge Chin.

“Despite all the emotion in the air, I do not agree with the suggestion that victims and others are seeking mob vengeance,” he observed. He agreed with Sorkin that Madoff was entitled to a sentence “determined objectively, and without hysteria or undue emotion.”

But he did not linger there. “Objectively speaking, the fraud here was staggering,” the judge went on. “It spanned more than 20 years.” Perhaps Madoff did not begin to mingle his fraud’s cash with his firm’s assets until the late 1990s, the judge continued, “but it is clear that the fraud began earlier.”

Judge Chin found no mitigating factors. “In a white-collar fraud case such as this, I would expect to see letters from family and friends and colleagues. But not a single letter has been submitted attesting to Mr. Madoff’s good deeds or good character or civic or charitable activities. The absence of such support is telling.”

Given Madoff’s age, Judge Chin acknowledged that any sentence above twenty years was effectively a life sentence. “But the symbolism is important,” he added. Madoff’s betrayal had left many people, not just his victims, “doubting our financial institutions, our financial system, our government’s ability to regulate and protect, and, sadly, even themselves.”

The victims were not “succumbing to the temptation of mob vengeance,” he concluded. “Rather, they are doing what they are supposed to be doing—placing their trust in our system of justice…. The knowledge that Mr. Madoff has been punished to the fullest extent of the law may, in some small measure, help these victims in their healing process.”

He paused. “Mr. Madoff, please stand,” he instructed.

Madoff and Sorkin stood together.

“It is the judgment of this court that the defendant, Bernard L. Madoff, shall be and hereby is sentenced to a term of imprisonment of 150 years—”

A cheer from the benches stopped him but was quickly stifled. He continued to itemize the sentence for each felony count. “As a technical matter,” he added, “the sentence must be expressed…in months; 150 years is equivalent to 1,800 months.” A few details were then added to the record, and Madoff was advised that he had limited rights to appeal.

The curtain came down: “We are adjourned.”

Madoff was once again handcuffed and led out a side door. At seventy-one, even if he had two more lifetimes ahead of him, he would spend them both in prison.

Just three days after Madoff’s sentencing came the closing of another chapter in the story of his fraud. Five miles uptown from the U.S. courthouse, a female U.S. marshal stood in the closet of the master bedroom in the penthouse apartment on East Sixty-fourth Street, as Ruth Madoff negotiated what she could pack into cartons and take with her.

She was leaving behind the appliances, the furniture, the artwork, the designer clothing, the gowns, the top-end fur coats—all the “insured and readily saleable personal property” in what was once her home. She had been told that she could keep items that could not be readily sold, and she hoped to keep the well-worn, thirty-year-old fur coat she was holding, which was arguably too old to have any resale value.

Maybe we could get a dollar for it, the marshal replied. The fur coat stayed.

So did her used golf shoes, three used golf gloves, thirty miscellaneous used golf balls, several crocheted golf club covers, seven Ella Fitzgerald commemorative euro-denominated postage stamps found in a coin purse, and a 1967 quarter fished out of a no-name black leather shoulder bag.

Meanwhile, the television cameras had settled outside the apartment building, somehow alerted to the fact that the U.S. Marshals would be taking over today. Ruth Madoff discovered the gauntlet and managed to slip out of the building, for the last time, through a back entrance.

The day before, the
Wall Street Journal
had reported online that after six months of investigation, there was no evidence that Ruth had been involved in her husband’s fraud.