Madoff with the Money (31 page)

Madoff was a mini Peyton Place, and even the sexual persuasion of certain female employees were often bantered about. Bernie is said to have enjoyed the girl-girl intrigue, especially because two of the lovers had high profiles within the company.

Despite all of these the salaciousness, Bernie and his secretary, Squillari, had a good working relationship. She apparently didn't mind his off-color innuendos and didn't feel she was being sexually harassed, or at least didn't make an issue of it because she had a good situation working at Madoff—that is, until her boss was arrested, and then she spilled some of the beans, talking about her years with the fraudster, his wife, and sons to
Vanity Fair
, for which she was said to have been paid. She parlayed the interview into a
Today
show appearance and secured her 15 minutes of fame by becoming part of Madoff history. Though she had worked closely with Bernie since the late 1980s, she claimed no knowledge of his crimes.

At one point in their working relationship, Bernie had been asked to fire Squillari—by no less a power than someone from the New York Catholic Archdiocese. “The archdiocese had called Bernie and wanted a dozen tickets for a Yankees game, but they only had 11,” recalls Nasi. “Someone there talked to Eleanor and she told them there wasn't an extra ticket, and they were really angry and asked to personally talk to Bernie. A few minutes later he came out of his office and told Eleanor, ‘They told me I should fire the person they were talking to.' So Bernie told Eleanor, ‘You're officially fired. You're not here anymore. I just fired you. I told them I would fire you to keep them happy. What assholes!'”

Nasi believed the archdiocese had called Bernie for the prized Bronx Bomber tickets because “they had invested with him. I heard they had a pretty nice bundle of money with him, so they wanted some free tickets.”

Apparently, Jewish charities and organizations weren't the only victims of Bernie's fraud, as it turned out. Catholics also got nailed to his cross.

While the New York archdiocese didn't show on the massive Madoff victims list, the Redemptorist Fathers of the Baltimore Province, a worldwide order officially called the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, suffered “significant” losses, and feared having to “reduce, suspend, or cancel” some of their ministries. They'd been invested in Madoff since the early 1990s, and money from their investment was “used to fund Catholic-school scholarships for inner-city children, to train future priests and brothers, to care for elderly members, and to fund other pastoral ministries, such as financial support to those suffering from the ravages of Hurricane Katrina and the Tsunami of December 2004.”

The Redemptorists were among at least three Catholic groups listed as victims. Others included the St. Thomas diocese in the Virgin Islands, which lost a reported $2 million, and St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The St. Thomas Aquinas High School campus housed a new and ultramodern arts center named after Michael Bienes, the Jew turned Catholic who along with Frank Avellino ran one of Bernie's earliest feeder funds. Bienes had pledged $2.5 million to the school, but after Bernie admitted the scam Bienes claimed he was taken, too, and couldn't meet all of his pledge to the school. Listed as the representative for the St. Thomas account was Monsignor Vincent Kelly, who was the supervising principal and reportedly a Bernie victim. (Monsignor Kelly later denied that the school was an active investor in Madoff, but said it had been back in the 1990s.)

Known for his glibness, Bill Nasi observes that Bernie was an equal-opportunity crook.

“On Mondays and Tuesdays he wore a turban, on Tuesdays and Thursdays he wore a yarmulke, and on Sunday he wore a bishop's miter.”

Shana Madoff, Bernie's niece, was the source of much office gossip and backbiting, mainly because she was considered bossy and demanding—a “royal bitch and pain in the ass,” as one less than diplomatic Madoff veteran describes her.

Shana was a graduate of the University of Michigan, where her cousin Mark Madoff also had matriculated, and had graduated from her father's law school alma mater, Fordham. Soon thereafter, around 1995, she came to work for her uncle and father as the rules compliance officer in the market-making area of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities.

A tall, slim, sexy, dark-haired fashionista with a little-girl way of talking, the Madoff princess, then 26, fell in love with a handsome, charismatic knight in Armani by the name of Scott Ira Skoller, then 30, whose divorced mother, Trina, was a pediatric nurse in New Orleans. Skoller was a clothing salesman at Tyrone—the elegant men's clothier specializing in Italian designer sportswear and suits in Roslyn, on Long Island, where Bernie and his brood lived for years. Although Tyrone was on a par with upscale Trillion, Bernie's favorite Palm Beach haberdasher, Bernie never once set foot in Tyrone.

The lovebirds were married on December 7, 1997, the 56th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Even though her elegant nuptials were held at the fancy Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue, her parents, Peter and Marion, were said to have rued the day—viewing their daughter's marriage as their own personal “date that would live in infamy,” mainly because they felt she could have done better for herself, husband-wise.

“Peter said, ‘My daughter's not marrying a clothing salesman,'” says a longtime Madoff family intimate. “Deep down, her parents were embarrassed by Scott's job, so Peter said he told Scott, ‘You have to become a partner, not just a salesman,' and Peter started saying, ‘Shana's not just married to a salesperson in a clothing store. I bought him into the business. I bought him a partial ownership in the place.'”

But that wasn't what had transpired.

According to Richard Bucksbaum, owner of Tyrone, Skoller never had an equity stake in the business; he was simply the clothing manager, but “the best” Bucksbaum ever had.

Bucksbaum says that from his perspective he never got any indication that Skoller's in-laws were unhappy with him.

He observes:

Skoller had known Shana from high school on the north shore of Long Island, and the two reconnected later through a mutual friend, as Bucksbaum recalls Skoller telling him. “Scott was a bit of an opportunistic kind of person and saw a good thing when he found it—and that was Shana.”

Bucksbaum was one of the guests at Shana and Scott's “lovely, beautiful, not over the top, in very good taste” wedding, and he and his wife sometimes socialized with the younger couple, who were living in a fancy condo on East 54th Street in Manhattan. After Shana had her daughter, Rebecca, mother and child would sometimes stop in the store to say hello. Peter Madoff also became a customer. “He wasn't snobbish, but he wasn't warmhearted, either,” and he didn't become a feeder fund of customers for Tyrone. “I wish he had [referred his friends],” says Bucksbaum, “but he wasn't [a source of new customers].”

With all of Skoller's qualities, Bucksbaum was surprised that he wasn't brought into the royal court of the Madoff family business where Shana was said to be making at least $500,000 a year.

“I don't think Scott was asked to join the business,” reckons Bucksbaum. “He wasn't a college graduate, and he had no financial acumen. I think eventually he wanted to own his own men's clothing store. That was his passion—clothing was his passion. That was what he knew, and Shana was making the money, so I don't think money was an object or problem for them.”

Bucksbaum always had in the back of his mind that if he decided to retire, Skoller, backed by Madoff money, would have bought his store.

“But it never came to that because it was a short-lived marriage, about three or four years,” he says. “Scott just came in one day and threw up his hands and said, ‘I've had enough! I'm separating from Shana. Maybe I'll go back and maybe I won't.'”

He didn't, and they were divorced.

Years later, Tyrone was hit hard by the Madoff mess.

“I had a very upscale clientele until the Madoffs did in a good portion of them,” maintains Bucksbaum. “The area that we are in is very close to Glen Oaks Country Club and Fresh Meadow Country Club, where the brothers recruited people as investors, and a lot of the people in the neighborhood got creamed. A lot of my customers got hit—and hit bad. There have been times we've called customers and told them, ‘It's the beginning of the season—come on in,' and they'll say, ‘Look, I lost a lot of money with Madoff, so call me when you're having a sale.'”

There was at least one commonality that Shana Madoff and her ex-husband had—both were clotheshorses. Black was the new black to Shana—the color she wore most of the time. Like her Aunt Ruth, Shana dressed chicly, but conservatively, favoring designers such as Narciso Rodriguez, whose dresses and shoes she came to admire when she was a law student and saw a photo of his clothes on the chic wife of John F. Kennedy Jr. She developed a relationship with a boutique in Manhattan's trendy meatpacking district, and every season the salespeople who dealt with her automatically sent Narciso's creations, and she was charged for everything that wasn't sent back.

Whatever Shana wanted she got.

In a profile of her and two other trendy fashion-forward types for the fall 2004 fashion issue of
New York
magazine, she described how she was leafing through a magazine while tanning on the beach in the Hamptons with friends. She suddenly left the crowd, cell phone pasted to her face, telling her pals she had to make an important call. It wasn't about Madoff business, however. In the magazine she was reading she was knocked out by an expensive tweed Prada bag, and she just had to order it; thus the emergency call.

“If I see something I like, I call around,” she stated in the
New York
magazine piece. “I just don't have time to shop . . . because I could be doing so many other things that are so much more productive.”

Co-workers at Madoff recall they got a hoot out of that one.