It has been a while since I've found an article so compelling. This is a definite must read. Being able to get into the thought processes of criminals is perhaps the most riveting aspect of this industry. It's remarkable.
Nadine
By Steve Fishman @ New York.
(Many) Interesting Excerpts:
And so, sitting alone with his therapist, in the prison khakis he irons himself, he seeks reassurance. “Everybody on the outside kept claiming I was a sociopath,” Madoff told her one day. “I asked her, ‘Am I a sociopath?’ ” He waited expectantly, his eyelids squeezing open and shut, that famous tic. “She said, ‘You’re absolutely not a sociopath. You have morals. You have remorse.’ ” Madoff paused as he related this. His voice settled. He said to me, “I am a good person.”
...
“Does anybody want to hear that I had a successful business and did all these wonderful things for the industry?” he continued. “And got all these awards? And so did my family? I did all of this during the legitimate years. No. You don’t read any of that.”
...
The pain that Madoff visited upon those closest to him has certain echoes in his own background, part of what drove him to succeed. “I had a father who was very successful in business,” he told me, a sporting-goods-manufacturing business. “He invented the punching-bag stand,” Madoff said. “The Joe Palooka punching-bag stand.” But the business failed when Madoff was in college. “You watch that happen,” said Madoff, “you see a father whom you idolize all of a sudden lose everything, and you’re frightened about something like that happening.”
...
He’d come up with a new trading strategy based on index options. But the new strategy needed volatility to work, and in the early nineties, the recession had settled in. “The market went to sleep,” said Madoff. He had too much of other people’s money and not enough to invest in.
...
“The chairman of Banco Santander came down to see me, the chairman of Credit Suisse came down, chairman of UBS came down; I had all of these major banks. You know, Safra coming down and entertaining me and trying [to invest with Madoff]. It is a head trip. [Those people] sitting there, telling you, ‘You can do this.’ It feeds your ego. All of a sudden, these banks which wouldn’t give you the time of day, they’re willing to give you a billion dollars,” he explained. “It wasn’t like I needed the money. It was just that I thought it was a temporary thing, and all of a sudden, everybody is throwing billions of dollars at you. Saying, ‘Listen, if you can do this stuff for us, we’ll be your clients forever.’ ”
...
But it was business that kept the boys on the edge of their seats. They sat raptly at the dinner table listening to their father’s adventures taking on the powers of Wall Street. And wherever they went, they heard of his mastery—strangers lavished on them tales of their father’s genius. Their father was a Wall Street player, a wizard, a man who’d made a lot of people a lot of money. At the time, these were reasons to follow in his footsteps. In fact, neither of the boys seemed to ever experience a rebellious impulse—“Mark wouldn’t wear pink,” said a friend from high school—and neither considered any employer besides BLMIS. In that high-school-yearbook entry, Andrew wrote, “Mark—future partner MADF,” and continued, “u’ll all see—I’m the 1.”
...
However happy Madoff was to have his family in the office with him, he made no bones about whose business it was. He once shouted at his brother, “Until your name is the name on the door, don’t tell me what to do.” The business revolved around Madoff, his thoughts, his needs, his idiosyncrasies, including his compulsion for order. “I definitely have obsessive-compulsive tendencies,” he said; everyone remembered him on his knees, straightening the venetian blinds.
...
And Madoff insists that rather than the pursuer, he was usually the pursued. People begged him to take their money. Madoff says that he waved red flags, issued caveats that should have been obvious to even an unsophisticated investor. “They were all told by me, ‘Don’t invest any more money than you could afford to lose. This is the stock market. There’s always stuff that can happen. Brokerage firms can fail. I could go crazy and do something stupid. If you want a [safe thing], put your money in government bonds. So everybody understood this.
...
And now there are limits to his sympathy. He sees himself not as some evil mastermind but as part of a system of corruption, maybe its linchpin, but he believes that people have lost their perspective on what actually occurred. “Look, none of my clients, even if they lost every penny they put in there, can plead poverty,” he said. “Look, it doesn’t mean I’m excusing what I did, doesn’t mean I don’t feel sorry for them. I’m embarrassed … It was the people that came in very late in the game that got hurt. All of my friends, most of my individual clients, are not net losers,” he said. “Now if you listen to [them], they’re living out of Dumpsters and they don’t have any money, and I’m sure it’s a traumatic experience to some, but I made a lot of money for people. Does it justify it? No.
“When you deal with people’s money, as I did for all my life,” he continues, “you realize how strange they are; it’s all like, ‘What have you done for me lately?’ If you made money for me, I was smart because I gave you the money and I went there, and if you lose money, then it’s all your fault. So you become somewhat callous about people lying.”
...
“I was always able to rationalize it … Look, I tried to give moneys back to my individual clients when I realized it was impossible to get myself out. I tried to return funds to my friends, moneys to the smaller clients. They wouldn’t take it back … Everybody said, ‘No, you can’t do that. You can’t send me my money back. I’ve been a friend of yours, or a client, for years’ … I couldn’t tell them I would have been doing them a favor. I couldn’t. I mean, could I have insisted? Yes.
“I did block it out of my mind,” he said. “I had no choice.”
...
He faced $7 billion in redemptions, which he didn’t have. He’d been feverishly trying to raise money and in fact had commitments for $700 million, which could have kept the scheme afloat for several more weeks. “What was the point? It wasn’t going to solve my problem. And I was so exhausted and deep down with worry, and so on. I just said to hell with it. I decided I wasn’t going to take [the money]. There was no point in me hurting additional people,” he told me. The authorities found checks for $173 million in his desk—uncashed.
...
Mark developed an addiction to news about his father’s case and the family’s troubles, and that made it almost impossible for him to move forward. Andrew could only do so much before losing his temper. “Shut off your fucking computer,” he told his brother. But Mark couldn’t. And so, says a close friend, “he saw the world’s perception of him through the eyes of these hateful people.”
...
But the world is not as Madoff imagines it from behind prison bars. To a friend, Andrew mocked his father’s thoughts: “Yes, I stole every penny that you had, and you’ve got to dive into a Dumpster to get a meal, but, you know, that’s the past, get over it.”
Click Here to Read: The Madoff Tapes
No comments:
Post a Comment