Madoff with the Money (27 page)

Ruth once told Bernie's Far Rockaway High School chum and eventual Ponzi victim Cynthia Greenberger Lieberbaum that she had found him overwhelmed with emotion and weeping in his chicly decorated living room as he contemplated his meteoric rise to the top, the riches that he had accumulated, and the luxury that enveloped him, according to Cynthia's brother, John (Greenberger) Maccabee.

Bernie's closet, says Maccabee, was on the Madoff penthouse grand tour, and he had the displeasure, as he later viewed it, of being guided through the realm by the lord of the manor.

The closet was brimming with the clothing treasures imagined by Trillion's owner, only more extreme.

Each drawer of a slender dresser displayed just one shirt, but there were 16 drawers, each with a shirt in the same shade of blue, matching Bernie's eye color, and each shirt had a similar cut. In another part of the closet hung his suits, also all identically cut—expensive and British, all of them the same charcoal gray and double-breasted. The pants each hung on separate hangers, as did the jackets, each with a bit of space between them. His shoes, handmade, at least a dozen pairs in all, were shined and lined up military-style in two rows.

It was all laid out as if for a
GQ
photo shoot.

Everything was hung with the greatest of care and put in place in such a way as to unconsciously underscore Bernie's rampant obsessive-compulsive issues.

“His closet was
so
anal,” says Maccabee. “A lot of people will toss off ‘Oh, Bernie was crazy.' Well, he
was
. He was fastidious about cars, his boats, his houses, so when he took me on a tour of his closet my mouth sort of dropped open. But it was in keeping with what I knew about him. It always felt like it was insecurity to me. It's common after I moved to L. A. for people to do that—to take you on a tour of their house and to show their closet, and the next thing I knew I was staring at little suits and little dresses. But the first person I knew to actually do that was Bernie—Bernie and Ruth. He was definitely showing off.”

Bernie had a closet full of similar suits at Madoff headquarters in case he needed to make a change for a special client or meeting.

The money didn't matter. It was always there for his taking.

Moreover, he actually had his suits cut in London not only for his body shape, which was teddy-bear chubby, but also for the very slender cell phone he always carried, the RAZR, which Motorola had started marketing in 2004 as an expensive, exclusive fashion phone for the hip and trendy. Bernie had first discovered the phone in Europe two or three years before it was sold in the United States, and he had paid $3,000 for the bragging rights to carry one.

In the July before his arrest he had gone phone shopping with his firm's head of purchasing, Amy Joel. The phone store salesman showed Bernie all the latest gadgets, but he rejected them. Joel says, “He took out his RAZR and told the clerk, ‘See this phone? I have all my suits built around this phone. It flips me out when I see men with their gawky phones in their pockets. It just doesn't look right. With this, you can't even tell it's in my pocket. I want three of them.' I could see the salesman going
ka-ching
,
ka-ching
,
ka-ching
in his head,” adds Joel. “When we walked out I said, ‘What's wrong with you? I'm here to negotiate and you're bragging about how much money you have and you buy three of these things,' and he turned to me and out of the blue said, ‘You're a fucking psycho!'”

Bernie also matched his custom-tailored suits (and phone) with another passion, buying and possessing some of the finest and most expensive wristwatches in the world. For more than a decade, he had been a customer of the very exclusive Somlo Antiques shop in prestigious Burlington Arcade in London, where the international division of Madoff was located.

George Somlo, the managing director, sold watches going back to the sixteenth century, and was an expert in horology, the science of measuring time. Besides his shop, Somlo participated in shows that catered to the wealthy—the Palm Beach Jewelry, Art, and Antique Show and the International Fine Art & Antique Dealers Show in New York. Although Somlo and Bernie bonded at both places, Bernie usually shopped with Somlo in London when he was there doing business.

“He did have very good taste in watches,” says Somlo. “He was very particular in what he liked.”

Bernie favored the slim Patek Philippes and Rolexes—“particularly the very discreet, not flashy, Rolex chronographs from the Forties and Fifties”—like the two he wore simultaneously on one wrist so he could easily tell the time between his New York headquarters and his London branch. “The watches he bought were very much collectibles,” notes Somlo. “Items that he bought from me long ago became considerably more valuable—if he had spent $10,000 for a watch, it became worth $50,000 or $60,000.” But, as Somlo pointed out, the value of Bernie's watch collection was minuscule compared to the billions he swindled. “In the whole big picture, it doesn't really amount to much”—not even the most expensive watch he had bought that cost Bernie $80,000, which he charged on his credit card. About the watches Bernie bought, Somlo noted, “If you saw one on his wrist, you would think they were nothing, unless you understood watches. They were very discreet.”

Somlo found dealing with Bernie, and meeting with Ruth, always a pleasurable experience.

“I would have trusted him with anything,” he asserts. “He was always so presentable. He was always very honorable. He didn't offer me ludicrous prices—he was completely the opposite” of the stereo-typical Ugly American.

Somlo recalls,

Oddly, Bernie placed a ceiling on how much he would spend on his passion, the tops being that $80,000 watch—a 1940 Patek Philippe chronograph that he purchased in late 2007 as a Hanukkah present for himself. From dealing with Bernie for years, Somlo knew that he wasn't a watch
expert
, but rather made his purchases based on how a watch
looked
and the kind of watches Somlo recommended. Notes Somlo:

In conversation with Bernie, Somlo learned that he had been collecting expensive vintage watches for years, long before he had become a customer of his. The two watch lovers became close enough that Bernie and Ruth invited Somlo and his wife to their New York penthouse about 18 months before Bernie was busted, and Bernie sent customers to the horologist, but never asked him to invest—luckily for Somlo.

“They were an adorable couple,” says the dealer, “so my wife and I were
astonished
, were just
floored
when he was arrested and when all this terrible news came out about him. He's the last person in the world we would have expected anything like this to happen [to]. I knew someone else who lost a fair amount of money with him who was also collecting watches, a business colleague of Bernie's from California. I also met somebody here in London who was part of the Fairfield Greenwich Group. His daughter went to the same school in America as my son, and he told me, ‘I'm completely bust.' All I heard when I was in Palm Beach were horror stories.

“I was surprised to hear that Bernie didn't kill himself.”

When he was in Palm Beach, Bernie enjoyed hanging out with David Neff at Trillion, and usually Ruth was at his side, although she had no role in helping him choose his clothing.

Observes Neff:

The two had a camaraderie, just like Bernie had developed with George Somlo.

Bernie talked about his several boats, each called the
Bull
—the one in Florida was a gorgeous classic wooden Rybovich fishing vessel, the best there is—and boasted about how he used the same decorator for his boats who also did the interior design on his home in France, and the interior of the plane he co-owned. Once again, everything was always done in black and gray. Even though he co-owned a jet, he mused about the fastest plane he chartered when he went to Europe, and about his preferred craft to get him around quickly when he was on the Continent.

To avoid the heavy traffic on the road between Cannes and St. Tropez, the
macher
from 228th Street in Laurelton decided that it would be best to travel on his yacht rather than by car. “So Bernie and Ruth would get on the boat and they'd go to St. Tropez for the weekend,” says Neff, “and I thought, oh, that is
so
cool; that makes so much sense.” Bernie's only complaint was that he had to hire a captain whose salary he had to pay through the winter even though Bernie and Ruth were usually there for only a month.

Neff saw Bernie as one of his true power customers. “People I know who would come into the store would bow to Bernie,” he says. Among those customers was a major Madoff investor, philanthropist and victim Jeffry Picower (and his wife Barbara). Picower would later come under investigation for allegedly telling Bernie how much in returns he wanted for his investment.

Bernie liked the way Neff treated him, and once offered him a tour of his offices in the Lipstick Building. “I had telephoned him about this fabric that I was getting for worsted spun-cashmere suits. He said he couldn't picture it, so I came to New York wearing the suit and he said he'd take one. He was very cordial, and showed me around, and told me what he did there—but I didn't know anything about that office on the 17th floor.”

To Neff, Bernie maintained that he only played golf with Ruth at what would turn out to be the Ponzi-ravaged Palm Beach Country Club, where the initiation fee was more than $300,000 and there was a long waiting list, and where as many as a third of the members had put their money in Madoff. And he bragged that he refused to attend any of the ritzy parties and charity balls to which he was constantly being invited as an A-lister in Palm Beach by his very grateful private clients—such as Carl Shapiro, the elderly entrepreneur who once owned Kay Windsor clothing, and who had begun putting his money with Bernie when he was just starting out.