Bernard Madoff is a member in good standing of the Palm Beach Country Club, the exclusive Jewish club on the North End of the island. When I would talk to friends and acquaintances who were members, they often chatted about good old Bernie. The 70-year-old Madoff had been the chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange. He was a brilliantly successful money manager who may well have handled the assets of a majority of the 300 members as well as that of those of a largely Jewish clientele across the eastern United States and a number of wealthy WASPS.
Bernard and Ruth Madoff bought their home on North Lake Way in 1967, and are among the most long standing members of the club. The Palm Beach Country Club is the ultimate symbol of the Jewish ascendency. Unlike the WASP clubs, to join you have to have made major charitable contributions. You also have to have made your fortune in clean ways. There are no garbage magnates, no slum lords. You have to be a person of character. And there was no one more revered and honored than Bernard Madoff.
Earlier this year I gave a talk at the club about my forthcoming book, Madness Under the Royal Palms. There were people in the room who are in my book and I avoided talking about them or anything that I thought might irritate or offend. I've been doing this sort of thing for years and I can take a few amusing anecdotes and strung them together into something that's not too painful and generally brings smiles if not laughter. But this afternoon there was dead silence. Nobody found anything I said amusing. In retrospect, I realize that these people had come to a bastion of anti-Semitism where Jews could not even enter the Breakers Hotel until 1965, and they had made the island theirs. And here I was to their minds mocking this world they had made their own. They found it profoundly unsettling.
People in Palm Beach sort themselves out into the group in which they belong based largely on how much money they have. Even the poorest of the islanders seem to have everything yet joy proves elusive, even for the country club members, because there is always someone richer or better socially connected. Joy is driving out of your 35,000-square-foot mansion in your Bentley and tooling up to the entrance of Mar-a-Lago for your fifteenth ball of the season, the valet parkers salivating at the chance to take your car and the prospect of a twenty-dollar tip. Joy is having a wife younger and thinner than any of the other wives at your table. Joy is subtly announced during dinner that your hedge fund scored 33 percent last year, while that of the arrogant son of a bitch across the table with the fat wife scored only 17 percent.
Those with the biggest financial gains generally had their money managed by Madoff. It was an honor having him handle your fortune. He didn't take just anybody. He turned down all kinds of people, and that made you want to give the man even more of your money. When he took your fortune, he told you that he would tell you nothing about how he achieved his returns. He was a god. He had the Midas touch.
Yesterday Madoff was arrested and accused of running what probably will prove the greatest Ponzi scheme in the history of the world. He may have dissipated as much as fifty billion dollars into nothing. For the elite Jewish world, it is a curse of almost biblical proportion. I was at a dinner party last night and one of the guests called on his cell phone a man whose money Madoff had managed. I know the man and he is a generous, kind person who recently gave away over a hundred million dollars. He said that both his company's retirement plan and his charitable foundation had been handled by Madoff. He was preparing to fly back to his Boston home to walk among the ruins. It's a story told scores of times yesterday. Bankruptcy. Despair.
There was one largely Jewish charity event last evening. "It was like the Titanic," one attendee said. "The ship was sinking, and people were crying, 'I lost this and that.' And everybody was drunk. The Titanic was going down and we might as well carry on."
There is a feeling of incredible shame, embarrassment, of exposure, as if their whole world has been exposed as jerry built. This evening the synagogues in Palm Beach will be full. And there will be men and women listening to the truths of a great and ancient faith as they have never listened before.
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Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC
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Maybe investors shouldn't have put all theirs eggs in one nest and this could have been averted. I feel sorry for the people who have lost their money but Im not too quick to call it a ponzi scheme. Maybe poor money management
Thou Shalt Not Steal!
From Exodus 20.
There is a special provision of the tax code that might allow some investors to write off all their loss against their 2008 income.
IRC 165(c)(2), a little used or understood deduction may help, but the investors, to claim the deduction in '08 must act now to establish their 'date of discovery'
To avoid being a victim of investment fraud…be prepared! The Associatio
Still, it's hard for me to believe that a person of normal intelligen
In case you never noticed, most religions discourage marrying out of the faith, and provide the means for non-member
Now if "Jew" were equivalent to "white," wouldn't there be a way to convert from other races to white? But there aren't, are there? I sincerely hope this helps you begin to overcome your wrong-head
Pahpah25 is correct about Boca Raton: companies based in that city tended to be suspect/sc
My gay friend is in a gay bowling club. It was started because the existing bowling clubs did not welcome gay members. But the gay bowling club welcomes straight members, and there are a number of straights on the teams.
Your comment about changing "Jewish" to "white" is ignorant because the history of the two groups is hardly the same. I see this argument from right-wing morons about Black groups, "Why is there no White History month?" as if white history isn't the history that's been taught all along. As if whites have suffered the same persecutio
Had it not been for the global recession this guy probably could have concealed his fraud for another decade or so...
Still trying to understand why the board of directors of a sizable foundation
There will always be crooks among us. They will quickly separate the fools from their money...
Otherwise this was a good article.
thousand -> million -> billion -> trillion is better than
thousand -> million -> thousand million -> trillion
A thousand times a dollar ain't as much as a thousand times a million dollars, etc. (It's actually a millionth as much.)
A wolf among sheep.