There
are times when personal tragedies catch us in a net of disbelief, rage or
compassion. Tragedy, like reality, is
sometimes not dissimilar to passing a car wreck on the side of the road and
willing oneself not to look. Yet, something hard to watch is also something
hard to turn away from.
Perhaps watching the ‘car wrecks' from the sidelines is even more compelling today in the era of television. We began broadcasting game shows like The
Dating Game in the 70s and MTV’s Real World in the 90s. Today we have The Bachelor. Jersey Shore.
The Kardashians.
They
can be hard to watch but often too hard to turn away from. Ratings for reality
shows have gone through the roof around the world.
Personal tragedies often fascinate
and puzzle us. Compelling personal accounts of loss or downfall often appeal to
our compassion, our curiosity and our ire. The story of the Bernie Madoff
family is one of them.
It wasn’t long after Madoff’s
confession amazed, enraged, confounded and shocked the world that books were
published about the ruin and misfortune of a his family. “The Story of Bernard
L. Madoff, The Man Who Swindled the World” by Deborah and Gerald Strober was
rushed to print in early 2009, just months after Madoff’s own sons called
authorities on December 10, 2008.
Immediately after the Ponzi scheme
was revealed, Alexandra Penney began blogging her personal experience as “The
Bag Lady Papers” in December 2008.
Penney, a graduate of Smith College, a published author and an editor of
Self Magazine, Penney made quite a bit of money in the 80s and 90s and a family
friend recommended that she invest it with Bernie Madoff. We all know the end
of that story. Overnight, Penney was
broke. Her blog became the book “Bag
Lady Papers: The Priceless Experience of Losing It All” (February 2010) and is
part rant, part confession, part therapy. It is also a story of tragedy and
triumph as Ms. Penney navigated through the experience of losing everything,
expressing her sometimes childish anger at Madoff and the Wall Street rules that
allowed it all to happen.
Adding to the farce, of course, was
the story of “family-man” Bernie’s 16-year affair with Sheryl Weinstein. “Madoff’s Other Secret: Love, Money, Bernie
and Me” (July 2009), is Weinstein’s account, published in the summer of 2009,
only seven months after Madoff’s Ponzi scheme came crashing down. At first,
many in the family chalked the book up to the fantasy and get-rich book scheme
of Weinstein. Today many believe the
details of the sordid affair, a pitfall of egos and wallets large enough to get
people into trouble.
A senior writer at the New York
Times, Diana B. Henriques covered the Madoff affair as it broke in December
2008 through the attempts to recover some of the lost billions for the innocent
families who had invested their life savings with Bernie. “Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death
of Trust” was published in April of 2011 and describes the scandal from inside
the financial world to inside the personal disasters of fractured
families.
Of course, there were people who
never believed Bernie Madoff’s luck with money early on. Erin Arvedlund and Harry Markopolos were two
of them. Essays, exposes and insistence
on investigation fell on deaf ears for over a decade and those frustrating
versions are recounted in “Too Good to Be True: The Rise and Fall of Bernie
Madoff “(June 2009) by Erin Arvedlund and “No One Would Listen: A True
Financial Thriller “(December 2009) by Harry Markopolos.
Many people in the world were caught up in
disbelief when Bernie Madoff was proved to be a swindler, a hoax and a
fraud. Certainly, he caught his family
by surprise. Central to the tragedy of
the Madoff family, was the crushing disappointment of the Madoff sons, Andrew
and Mark.
Published nearly simultaneously, “Truth and
Consequences: Life Inside the Madoff Family” (2011) by Laurie Sandell and “The
End of Normal: A Wife’s Anguish, A Widow’s New Life” (2011) by Stephanie Madoff
Mack tell a nearly identical story but from two different viewpoints.
The Madoff had two sons, Mark and Andrew.
Both sons graduated from college to jobs in the Madoff firm and a career in a
somewhat separate, somewhat connected firm that operated several floors above
the Bernie Madoff Ponzi operation
“Truth and Consequences” explains the story from the younger brother,
Andrew Madoff’s, point of view. Author
Sandell chronicles the personal versions of Andrew and his girlfriend,
Catherine and Bernie Madoff’s wife, Ruth.
Their story sometimes conflicts with that of Stephanie Mack just as impressions
of Bernie Madoff conflicted with the real man behind the mask.
Stephanie Madoff Mack was married to
Mark, the eldest son of Bernie and Ruth Madoff. On the second anniversary of
Bernie Madoff’s arrest, Mark tragically took his own life leaving his wife and
four children from two marriages. The accusations and pressure of living with
his father’s crimes weighed so heavily that Mark Madoff could no longer bear
it. Believing that he and his younger
brother did the right thing in turning in their father, Mark could not believe
it when they were accused for an opulent lifestyle supported by Madoff money
from the day they were born. .
Stephanie Madoff’s story, “The End
of Normal” is a heartfelt chronicle is Mark’s story. Like Alexandra Penney’s “Bag Lady Papers” the
details of a lifestyle replete with expansive apartments in Manhattan,
beach-front vacation homes around the world and unlimited credit accounts can
be a bit nauseating. Most of the have-nots, or middle class, know a world very
different than Penney’s and Mack’s.
Victims of Bernard Madoff’s financial crimes
and schemes involved all of his close friends and all members of his family. They are stories of the realities of personal
tragedy.
