Madoff with the Money (33 page)

In many ways Andy and Mark were mirror images of the first-generation brothers of the Madoff dynasty, Bernie and Peter. Like his uncle Peter, Andy was thought by friends and associates to be the smarter of the two brothers. He was Ivy League, and had studied in an undergraduate Wharton School program at the University of Pennsylvania. He was the brother who knew the technical side of the business, the computer-savvy guy, while Mark was a chip off the old man's block—he even pledged Sammy, Sigma Alpha Mu, when he was at Michigan, the same party-boy Jewish fraternity that Bernie had joined during his one year at the University of Alabama.

Mark was the outside guy, so to speak—the gregarious one whom everyone at BLMIS seemed to like. He was hailed for running the firm's trading arm with an even hand, whereas Andy was considered tough, standoffish, and outright rude at times.

For one thing, Andy didn't particularly like Charles Wiener, the director of administration for BLMIS, who was the son of Bernie's sister, Sondra. Charlie, as he was known, had started on the trading desk in the 1970s. The general feeling was that he was there only because he was Bernie's nephew, and a relative to whom Bernie didn't particularly take a liking.

“He always wanted to fire him, but Bernie kept him around because of his sister,” says a BLMIS and Madoff family insider. “Charlie was a sweetheart, adorable but not the brightest light in the chandelier.”

Andy Madoff kept Charlie at a distance, but he found himself together with him one summer day as they were headed to the Hamptons in an SUV for the Madoffs' annual summer party. When they reached Bernie's Amagansett manor, Andy let loose on his cousin, according to the Madoff insider.

Besides the Ponzi scandal, Andy had a tough period, having had cancer but surviving it, unlike his cousin Roger.

His marriage also fell apart after 14 years.

In January 1993, in a beautiful ceremony presided over by a rabbi at the very WASPy Union League Club in New York, 25-year-old Andy had married 24-year-old Deborah Anne West, daughter of Douglas West, a New York investment broker, and Susan L. West, then the managing editor at the Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group. At the time, the bride, a graduate of Duke University, was a book promotions consultant.

Their wedding announcement in the
New York Times
described Andy's mother as the “director of administration” at Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities.

At the time of their wedding, Debby was working in publishing for a children's book club, and by coincidence was the assistant to the young woman who would marry Mark Madoff. She was described as “cute and sexy” by a friend of the couple. “Her family didn't have anywhere near the money the Madoffs had. As my mother would say, Debby ‘stepped in shit' when she married into the Madoff family—meaning she hit it big in a family with lots of money and a majestic lifestyle.”

The Madoffs had two girls, who were sent to one of the best private schools in New York.

After they separated in 2007, Andy began dating Catherine Hooper—a cute, fresh-faced, outdoorsy, formerly married young woman who stands a foot and half shorter than Andy. One thing the two had in common was fishing, of all things. Hooper had been a cover girl for a magazine called
Fish & Fly
, which did a profile on her and her love of fishing. A 1994 graduate of Bryn Mawr College, she once wrote an article for the alumni magazine about a trip to Venezuela “to learn to fly-fish for bonefish.” The article was accompanied by a sexy shot of her, all wet in the water holding a big, slimy bluefin trevally. “In the space of two years,” she wrote, “fishing has taken me to places I would never have dreamt of, has introduced me to people whom I am blessed to know, and helped me overcome the barriers of fear that held me back from fully enjoying my life.”

The world of Madoff was one of those places.

Like his father, Andy was an avid fisherman—back in high school Bernie had made up that story about a fictitious book he had read called
Hunting and Fishing
, and among his prized possessions were his luxurious sportfishing boats. Andy headed an investment group that bought a fishing-related company called Abel Reels, and had also invested in a Manhattan fishing supply store called Urban Angler Fly Shop. Hooper, whom Andy planned to marry just around the time his father was arrested, was reportedly a former co-owner of Urban Angler.

Like Andy and cousin Shana, Mark Madoff also had a first marriage that failed even though he and his wife were considered a “golden couple—a Jewish Barbie and Ken.”

A woman who was in the Madoff boys' circle growing up in Roslyn on Long Island, where both Madoff boys went to the public high school, recalls how girls swooned over Mark.

The woman became a member of the Madoff family circle and bonded with Ruth, who she says was “always perky, warm, lovely. Anytime I did anything with the family they were wonderful to me. Bernie would take us out to dinner when we'd go to Montauk. They just could not have been warmer and more inclusive.”

Noting the stories about Bernie's obsessive-compulsive problem, and how he wanted everything in his offices to be black and gray, and how he wouldn't let Ruth sit on their penthouse antique furniture, she says he was the same way at home at the Montauk beach house.

“It's fairly austere and impeccable, and it's all grays,” says the woman, who worked in publishing. “Bernie was
so
strict about how things should look. He gave us strict orders on how to fold the comforters a certain way. If someone tracked sand into the house he went bananas. He demanded that everything be in the proper place. But the only person who stood up to him was Mark's wife, Susan. She was not afraid of Bernie. She did not take any of his shit. She would just tell him to fuck off.”

It was Bernie and Ruth's longtime friends the Kavanaus—Joe and Jane—who played Cupid, sort of setting Mark up with the daughter of close friends, pretty Susan Freeman from Rye Brook, New York, who also went to the University of Michigan, as did the Kavanaus' daughter.

Jane Kavanau recalls:

“They
were
the golden couple,” says a close friend of the former Mrs. Mark Madoff who was also at Michigan at the same time. “They met freshman year, fell in love, and saw each other through all four years of college. Susan and Mark actually look like brother and sister—both are blond and beautiful—the Jewish Barbie and Ken. Susan was very bright, popular, sharp, a lot of fun, from just a kind of average middle-class family.”

After graduating from college, the two lived together in a spectacular midtown Manhattan doorman-attended apartment building owned by Bernie's pal Fred Wilpon, who also owned the New York Mets and was one of the victims of Mark's father's fraud. In their mid-20s, Susan Freeman became Mrs. Mark Madoff in “a classy and lovely, understated and tasteful” wedding held at the Fresh Meadows Country Club in Great Neck—known as the “Madoff country club” where later a number of wealthy members became Bernie victims.

Mark and Susan had two “adorable” children, and eventually moved, the close friend says, “to a house that was like to die for”—a $6 million mansion in ritzy Greenwich, Connecticut.

Then the marriage went south.

“Susan's a very feisty girl. As one of our mutual friends said, ‘She's always full of piss and vinegar.' She likes to fight, have lots of drama, and I think she just kind of got bored with Mark. It was sort of like a midlife thing. They were in a rut.”

The two got divorced, and both remarried—the former Mrs. Madoff married a man with whom she had gone to high school, the friend says—and both Susan and Mark had children with their new spouses.

Like everyone else, the close friend was dumbfounded when the Madoff scandal broke. She says,“I do not believe Mark had any involvement, because he's such a straight arrow. He told some friends, mutual friends, that he had no idea what Bernie was doing, and he hasn't spoken to his parents since it happened. As shocked as I am about Bernie, I would be more shocked if Mark and Andy knew.”

In late October 2007, 14 months before Bernie admitted to committing the largest known fraud in history, he was invited to be the honored guest alongside other Wall Street icons such as Muriel Siebert at a panel session to discuss the future of the stock market.

The session was sponsored by the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination, and held at the organization's Manhattan headquarters. The center encouraged discussions on all sorts of subjects, including business.