Madoff with the Money (36 page)

He had a great sense of humor, he was very considerate, and it's now going to sound peculiar, but I actually trusted in him. Our relationship was always very congenial, and very easygoing. Bernie was very giving of his time, and of his money, and of his possessions. He was not the kind of guy who would ever quibble—“It's my plane, it's my boat.” He never was possessive of those things. He was always very sharing with them, and on top of that, so was Ruth. Ruth was socially more than acceptable. She was always vibrant, always happy, and always charitable in complimenting people and sensitive to their needs. It's very funny in retrospect that they were a very congenial couple, and always pleasant to spend time with.

 

And then came Bernie's arrest, and the revelation of his mind-boggling fraud.

“My wife and I are still in shock over the whole thing,” says Shapiro. “She and Ruth became at least as close as Bernie and I.”

In the weeks leading up to Bernie's sentencing, U.S. District Judge Denny Chin, who was applauded for ordering Bernie incarcerated and out of penthouse detention after he pleaded guilty, received letters from more than a hundred victims—ranging from their 30s to their 90s—telling their hellish stories, and asking the jurist who would pass sentence to give no hope or forgiveness. The victims called Bernie a “monster” and a “serial criminal.”The letters were made public.

It's one thing to lose one's life savings; it's another thing to lose one's life.

Bernie, the swindler, could also be thought of as Bernie, the murderer. As he spends the rest of his life behind bars, he does so with blood on his hands because two of his Ponzi victims, depressed about being fleeced, committed suicide.

The first was the French aristocrat and co-founder of the money management firm of Access International Advisors, 65-year-old Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, whose body was discovered at his desk in his 22nd-floor office in a Manhattan building. He had slashed both of his wrists and a bottle of pills was found nearby, but he had left no suicide note. What was known, however, was that he had placed $1.4 billion of his investors' money into Madoff, and all of it was lost. And his entire life savings were wiped out.

After his suicide three days before Christmas 2008, while Bernie relaxed in his plush penthouse under house arrest, de la Villehuchet's Parisian brother, Bertrand, told reporters, “For him, it was a positive act of honor. He brought his friends and clients, and a lot of them were his friends, to a catastrophic situation.”

More to the point, though, were the comments of de la Villehuchet's widow, Claudine, who a week before Bernie's sentencing broke her silence and declared in a TV interview, “He killed my husband. I think he's a murderer.”

The other suicide victim who had been fatally attracted to Bernie's promises of financial wealth and security was 65-year-old William Foxton, a retired British army major, who shot himself to death on a Southampton, England, park bench in February 2009 after losing everything he had invested with Bernie. Foxton's 28-year-old son, Willard, pledged to himself to find out who this guy Madoff was and how and why he did what he did to his father and others. “I wanted to take all the medals my father had won for gallantry and throw them into Bernie Madoff 's face, to make Madoff know the sort of man he killed,” Foxton told the BBC. On his U.S. journey to probe Madoff he encountered other victims, such as a woman named Norma Hill, who after her husband had passed away decided to discuss his investments with Bernie.

She met with him personally. She told the BBC:

She believed him and left her husband's investment with him for two decades. She lost it all, and expected she'd have to sell her home.

The former New York City police officer who served as Bernie's bodyguard during his penthouse confinement and who accompanied him to court says that Bernie never for a moment showed any remorse for what he had done, or any compassion for any of his victims during the time he spent with him. His only concern, the ex-cop said, was that the SUV that transported him didn't have blackout windows, allowing news photographers to take pictures of him. Bernie left that complaint on the bodyguard's answering machine, the tape of which was played on
20/20
.

The emotional words and the immense losses of regular middle-class, everyday Americans who were hoping through Bernie, or through a Madoff feeder fund, to have a better life and a secure future made it difficult for many to have much sympathy for another breed of victim of his crimes—the big-name celebrities from the world of entertainment who claimed losses.

As one close observer of the Hollywood and entertainment scene notes:

Most, if not all, of the celebrities taken to the cleaners by Bernie had invested through feeder funds and did not even know of Madoff until he was arrested.

For some, like 51-year-old Bacon, best known for his role in the film
Footloose
a quarter century ago, the publicity his victimization generated in the media was possibly worth more than his loss, which was never disclosed. His story was carried around the world and constantly referred to in the media. A few weeks after Bernie's arrest, the actor offered a few a boo-hoo words to a celebrity weekly: “We'll march on. We have to. There's nothing you can do about it,” he was quoted as saying. And he announced, “I don't have anything lined up right now, but I need to work, for obvious reasons.” (He later claimed to the web site The Daily Beast that he was misquoted and taken “so out of context.... I'm hoping that story becomes old news as soon as possible. . . . I'm working on stuff, you know, developing stuff.” But the first interview in
Life & Style
got all the attention and garnered all the sympathy.)

His interview appeared in mid-January. A month later, however, he had a presumably well-paid starring role in a well-received HBO film appropriately called
Taking Chance
. Moreover, his actress wife, Kyra Sedgwick, star of the popular TV series
The Closer
, earned a reported $300,000 an episode. In mid-June the high-earning Sedgwick, who had just been honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, went public, acknowledging, “We did not lose everything. We lost hard-earned money that we worked very hard for that was [in] what we thought . . . [was] a safe place. It's painful, but a lot of people lost a lot more.”

Actress Jane Fonda, ex-wife of billionaire Ted Turner, was starring in a hit Broadway show in the weeks right after the Madoff scandal struck. Between acts during rehearsals, she jumped on her laptop to blog to her fans about everything from doing “pilates” with someone named Kimberly, to rehearsing for the second act and being “blown away by the set and the lighting,” to getting fleeced by Bernie.

She wrote:

A commenter on the Fonda blog, which had a huge fan base, responded, “The nerve of that Maddoff [
sic
]. Not that I'm rich or anything, but I just opened a pension plan and I freak out every time I hear about that guy in the news.”

Lawrence Harvey Zeiger, better known as popular $7-million-a-year CNN interviewer Larry King, reportedly lost more than $1 million in the Ponzi scheme. King and Bernie had a few things in common. Both had been born in Brooklyn, and, like Bernie, Larry had faced criminal charges once upon a time himself. On December 20, 1971, he was charged with grand larceny involving $5,000, and had his mug shot taken at a police station, resulting in his suspension from a job he had at a local Miami radio station. “My lawyer thought we could beat the charges,” King wrote in his 2009 autobiography. In the end, though, the case was dismissed because the statute of limitations had run out.

After Bernie was in the slammer, the eight-times-married King interviewed Donald Trump and asked, “How did he [Bernie] get away with it?” Answered The Donald, “Because people were stupid enough or foolish enough to just keep pouring money into his accounts. . . . They'll probably change the name of Ponzi to Madoff. It was really the ultimate scheme.”

After he was fleeced by Bernie, King privately consulted over corned beef sandwiches at his favorite Beverly Hills deli hangout, Nate'n Al, with another poster child of Wall Street greed, “Junk Bond King” Michael Milken, who went to prison for almost two years in the late 1980s for securities violations stemming from an insider trading investigation. The tabloid celebrity web site TMZ ran an exclusive photo of Larry sitting opposite Milken in the deli. The caption said, “Larry did a lot of listening during the meet as Michael spoke almost nonstop.”