Bernie Madoff: Thoughts from the jailhouse

MADOFF: The Final Word

Author: Richard Behar

Publisher: Avid Reader Press

Pages: 384

Price: $35

We don’t yet have “Madoff: The Musical,” but years after his 2021 death from kidney disease in a federal prison hospital, Bernie the Ponzi-scheming potentate keeps yielding cultural dividends. An experimental film shown at Lincoln Center. A Netflix documentary series, The Monster of Wall Street.  And now, adding to a fat stack that includes a colouring book and an exposé by New York Times  reporter that generated its own Robert De Niro movie, a new prose probe entitled Madoff: The Final Word. 

Final? As its own author, Richard Behar, admits: Doubtful. 
 

A long-time investigative journalist who has taken on, among other formidable institutions, the litigious Church of Scientology, Behar spent 15 years seemingly half-shackled to and half-tickled by this, his first book. Along with many, many secondary interviews, he visited Madoff in prison three times; talked to him on the phone about 50 times; and received from him dozens of handwritten letters and hundreds of emails. (He’s far from the first or only reporter to have visited the man in the clink, but the passage of time has loosened some auxiliary tongues— though death has stilled others.)

For every dollar he stole, Madoff seems to have generated at least one piece of regular paper. The hoard of 30 million documents he didn’t manage to destroy, Behar writes, “is nearly half the size of the printed material collection of the US Library of Congress.” The shredding operation Madoff ran starting in the mid-90s, in a Brooklyn facility now called Tuck-It-Away, had burlap bags of the scraps taken to a nearby recycling plant, his secrets “dissolving to mulch.”
 

Who knew he was so eco-conscious?
 

Behar approaches this towering mountain of material with rigour, but also a certain informality. He delights in its wackier crags, like the auction of Madoff goods, the proceeds going to claw back money for those he'd ripped off, at which even his boxer shorts were for sale. Andres Serrano, the artist known for “Piss Christ,” paid $700 (“which seems crazy cheap”) for 22 pairs of the shoes in Bernie’s large collection, including leopard-print loafers.

Madoff’s reading material in jail, Behar reports, included Leon Uris’s 1953 novel Battle Cry. But the gruesome deaths of various players in the Madoff saga — the overmedicated multibillionaire floating in a Palm Beach pool; the French financier’s office wastebasket filling with blood from his slashed wrists — are more John Grishammy.
 

Madoff: The Final Word  carefully explains complicated matters like the turned cheek of JP Morgan Chase, which Behar calls “a gluttonous hydra when it came to Bernie,” and the trial of the Madoff Five, but it also includes exclamation points, asides and expressions like “Poof!” and “amirite.” Behar’s conversational intimacy — he discloses, for example, that his subject’s prison shrink reassured him he was just a compartmentaliser, not a sociopath — would have been fortified considerably by footnotes to distinguish between new material and old. 
 

Not until the middle of the book do we learn that Madoff-invested money paid for the author’s own modest down payment on an apartment; his Aunt Adele was one of those who lost her life savings, which she took remarkably well. “I call Bernie ‘My Little Gonif,’” she told him, “using the Yiddish word for a thief or scoundrel. ‘A gonif steals someone’s lollipop but does it cutely.’”

Behar, too, seems determined to see Madoff’s humanity, and the tragedy of his family.
 

An older son, Mark, died by suicide in 2010, on the anniversary of his father’s arrest; the younger, Andrew, succumbed to lymphoma four years later, and Bernie was not permitted to attend either funeral. “Losing your only children is a life sentence in itself,” Behar writes, “but to mourn them from a literal cage has to be unbearable, even for a financial cannibal.”

He finds a grim humour in Madoff’s widow, Ruth, whose level of complicity remains undetermined. Behar interviews the lawyer who is trying, so far futilely, to return to her the canopied marital bed — “shorter than a queen” — and quotes the hard-boiled FBI agent who chides her for smoking. “Ruth, that’s gonna kill you,” he says. “If only,” she replies.
 

“No wonder Bernie doesn’t mind prison,” the agent says later. “She won’t shut the [bleep] up.”
 

Perhaps most provocatively, Behar takes chapter-long issue with the characterisation of Madoff’s wiped-out clients as “victims,” preferring the term “losers.” After all, he writes, “these poor unfortunates had been pulling in massive, impossibly consistent profits without a peep — often for decades.”
 

He’s right that investors should conduct due diligence. But there’s a weird unacknowledged echo with one of Donald J Trump’s favourite disparagements that makes Behar’s own, late-in-the-narrative attempt to yoke together Madoff and the former president as avatars of a national mental-health crisis seem shallow.
 

In a large crowd that includes accountants, key punch operators, secretaries, traders, turncoats, quants, Securities and Exchange Commission officials, lawyers, court officers and the dear departed Aunt Adele — who worked with neuroscientists and calls for a forensic examination of the warped folds of Bernie’s brain — the psychiatrist Behar consults seems like a last-minute and somewhat awkward invitee.
 

Even with various quirks and jerks, though,  Madoff: The Final Word  boils a story of mythic proportions down to a bowlful of golden nuggets. If this is the first time you’re being served, so much the better.

The reviewer is a Times book critic and occasional features writer©2024 The New York Times News Service