Bernie Madoff: the gift that just keeps giving

August has been a good month for Tales from Madoff.

First, there was the bit-een of news that the near-widow Madoff can't spend $100 on any one item without informing a trustee watching over her breathtakingly scant - compared to what once was - funds.

It has likely been many years since Ruthie spent less than that on an article of clothing or personal adornment. For someone used to bespoke, the thought of off-the-sale-rack at Macy's must be unspeakable. Too bad Ruthie lives in NYC, where being chic is almost an obligation. If she were to move to Boston, she could outfit herself top to toe from the L.L. Bean catalog without dropping $100 on any one item, as long as she stayed away from the down parkas (which I'm sure she could get trustee permission for). No one would notice the sartorial difference - as long as she hung on to her good little black dress. Plus, L.L. Bean awards frequent buyer coupons, so Ruthie could accrue them and have an occasional splurge on a $100+ something that came in under once the coupons were applied, and the trustees would be none the wiser.

Of course, Ruthie is in NYC, which means she does have access to street vendors hawking knock off Vuitton bags and Rolex watches, so she can keep up appearances that way. (Just don't take that Vuitton bag out in the rain, honey.)

But Ruthie has more on her mind these days, I'm sure.

To the long, unbroken string of indignities that she has suffered since last December comes the news that the love of her life canoodled for twenty years with one Sheryl Weinstein, former CFO for Hadassah. Things worked out for Hadassah: the $40M they invested with Madoff turned into $130M. (They've worked out so far, anyway. The $90M profit could be subject to a clawback.)

Things went less well for Weinstein on the personal front.  She and her husband invested their personal fortune with Madoff, and it is, alas, gone.

Weinstein’s husband, Ronald, told a Bloomberg reporter after the meeting he lost a “ton of money.”

Ronald Weinstein said he knew Madoff and once thought he was “unassuming, a very nice guy.” Weinstein said he felt he was “a very poor judge of character.”

Amen to that, Ron. (Wonder what the Sheryl-Ronald behind closed doors confabs sound like these days.)

Sheryl W was one of those who spoke at Bernie sentencing hearing, where she:

...urged the judge to keep Madoff “in a cage behind bars” for his crimes.

“He is a beast that has stolen for his own needs the livelihoods, savings, lives, hopes and dreams and futures of others,” she said. “He has fed upon us to satisfy his own needs. No matter how much he takes and from whom he takes, he is never satisfied. He is an equal opportunity destroyer.”

Near penury,

Weinstein and her husband have recently published Laundry Today, a commercial and industrial laundry trade paper.

Laundry Today? Does the excitement ever end? But I suppose the employment prospects aren't all that great for a CPA/CFO who carried on with the manager of the money that she directs.

Of course, there's more. Sheryl has a tell-all coming out next week: “Madoff’s Other Secret: Love, Money, Bernie, and Me.”

A representative for the book's publisher, St. Martin's Press, says that the book, which is ghostwritten - not enough time to pen your own, I guess, what with churning out Laundry Today - and promises to be a "'fast read.'"

Yes, and I'm guessing a fast trip to the remainder bin. Too bad they didn't get this out earlier in the summer. Sounds like a fabulous beach read.

(Source for material quoted above: Bloomberg.)

If Sheryl Weinstein rues the day she met Bernie, Frank DiPascali no doubt does as well.

DiPascali was, more or less, Bernie's wing-man, and recently admitted in court that he helped carry out the Ponzi scheme.

In return for providing detail on the scam, and naming names, DiPascali hopes to reduce a potential 125 years in an orange jumpsuit sentence down to something that he can live with, like 90 or a 100 years.

DiPascali is giving the court the dish on how they were able to carry things out by:

....using historical stock data from the Internet to create fake trade blotters, sending out fraudulent account statements to clients and arranging wire transfers between Mr. Madoff’s London and New York offices to create the impression that the firm was earning commissions from stock trades...

And, from his account, keeping the scheme afloat and investors and regulators duped was a full-time job. To give the appearance that Mr. Madoff’s firm had mastered the markets, Mr. Madoff and his employees would track stock prices and then simply pretend to buy stocks whose trajectories matched the firm’s investment goals, Mr. DiPascali said. (Source: NY Times.)

Wouldn't it have been easy, like, just to make some, you know, real trades  and let the blue chips fall where they may?

So now we wait for DiPascali to dime the managers, go-fers, sales people, programmers, and admins who were cogs in the grand Ponzi scheme. It will be interesting to learn how many knew out right that what they were doing was criminal vs. those that had a glimmer vs. those that had nary a clue.

It's easy enough to think that they all "had to know."

But it's also easy enough to think that those at the lower end of the work hierarchy, especially those who are by nature incurious, could have just shrugged and 'whatevered' their way into unwitting participation in the crime.

'Hey, the boss told me we needed to come up with a program to do fake trades. It's for some simulation or something. Something that's got to do if seeing if a model really works. Whatever. I'm on it. Seems like an interesting enough project."

Or, "Damn, the computer broke so I had to work until 10 last night to get these statements out for Mr. DiPascali. You should see how much some of these people are worth. If I had a nickel for every million these a-holes make, I'd be rich. Sometimes I just want to say, Frankie, baby, how about tossing a little my way."

Easy enough to see how easy it'd be.

Maybe not for me and thee, with our natural curiosity, trove or analytical skills, and deep-seated suspicion of authority. But for some "little guy" or BBQ girl, hey, it's a job. They don't pay me to think. 

It will be very interesting to see how this works out.

All that's related to the Madoff Affair is not, fortunately, the tawdry histrionics of Bernie's romance of the century with Hadassah's CFO, or the smoking guns that DiPascali promises.

I was remiss in not earlier noting July's bright and shining piece of Madoff-related news, which I will lift in its entirety from Boston.com:

A North Shore-based philanthropist is using $5 million of his own money to restore the retirement savings of his employees who lost their nest eggs to admitted swindler Bernard L. Madoff.

Robert I. Lappin today began restoring the funds to 60 employees of his company, Salem [Massachusetts]-based Shetland Properties, Inc., and to his private charity, The Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation. The employees' 401(k) plans, as well as the foundation's money and some of Lappin's personal wealth was managed by Madoff, who used the funds in what investigators believe is the largest Ponzi scheme in history.

"I wanted to do the right thing," he said. "And, I feel, I've done the right thing and that to me is my reward."

Lappin has also revived his foundation, which closed briefly in December after losing $8 million to Madoff. The nonprofit supports Jewish education and culture on the North Shore, and has restored 17 programs in education, interfaith outreach and family development. On Sunday the foundation helped send 82 Jewish teens to Israel after raising $450,000 in private donations for the Youth To Israel travel program.

Lappin has owned Shetland Properties, Inc., for 51 years. He said his net worth is now less than $10 million, a tenth of what it was before the scandal.

So here's to you, Robert Lappin, my candidate for Mensch of the Year. In a world that seems to be increasingly populated by anti-mensches the likes of  Sheryl Weinsteins and Frank DiPascali, it's nice to know that he's around, isn't it?