Madoff: It has been two years since Bernie Madoff's spectacular Ponzi scheme was unravelled. Justice has seemingly been executed — the fund manager has spent more than a year in prison, where he will perish. His wife was forced to liquidate their assets. Yet the Madoff mystery continues to trundle tragically and obscurely forward around a central conundrum: How could just one man have perpetuated so massive a fraud?
Indeed, the questioning over how Madoff was able to swindle thousands of seemingly sophisticated investors and banks out of some $20 billion or more of their money seems to be rising in intensity, not falling, as each anniversary of the affair passes.
On Saturday, precisely two years after Madoff's unmasking, his 46-year-old son Mark looped his dog Grouper’s black leash around a pipe in his Manhattan apartment and hung himself while his toddler son slept in an adjacent room. It was to Mark that Bernie admitted his crime — a decision that led him and his brother to inform the authorities.
The Madoff scion’s death followed a frenzied week of legal actions by Irving Picard, the trustee for Madoff’s financial victims. Among the 60 suits filed by Picard was a $19.6 billion charge against Sonja Kohn, a banker from Vienna that file photographs showed looking somewhat gender-neutral in a red bouffant wig.
Now, Picard was under a deadline, and pressure, to cast his net wide in trying to reclaim assets, or force settlements, with any firm or individual that worked with Madoff prior to his transgressions becoming public. That has included JPMorgan , which he sued for $6.4 billion two weeks ago, and even the estate of Stanley Chais, a West Coast investment adviser who directed money to Madoff and actually died in September.
Suing Kohn for the entire lot that was lost in the scandal — combined with the tragic suicide of Mark Madoff - has only deepened the mystery.
If anything, these events have reopened other questions: Was Kohn — whose lawyer says she was a victim of Madoff — in fact laundering money, one of the trustees’ allegations? Did Mark Madoff really know nothing of his father’s activities? The truth is, the truth may never be known.
