The Madoff Mystique

He is out of sight behind bars now, but the maddeningly blank face of Bernard Madoff is still with us like the smile of the Cheshire Cat. The mild-looking little man who stole billions with minimal exertion is proving to be irresistible to the literary imagination.

In a New York Times OpEd, Daphne Merkin, who is writing a book about Jews and money, maintains, "There is no single code word--no 'Rosebud'--that will lead us to decipher the Madoff phenomenon...

"Indeed, what is lost amid the fury of some of those who handed their money over to him is that theirs was a voluntary--nay, eager--association. No one was holding a gun to anyone’s head, saying sign up with Mr. Madoff or else.

"Far from it: people scrambled to find a home within his financial orbit, auditioning for the role of Madoff client the way you would try out for a place at an Ivy League college, nudging connections to put in a good word, calling in favors to get in on a piece of the Madoff action."

She concludes that "to call Mr. Madoff a sociopath isn’t really to explain him so much as to explain our failure to pick up on his scam. 'Everything that deceives,' decreed Plato, “can be said to enchant.'"

In the New Yorker, Woody Allen conjures up two Madoff victims who have been reincarnated as lobsters in the tank of a Manhattan restaurant: "The day I found out he could handle my account I was so thrilled I cut my wife’s head out of our wedding photo and put his in. When I learned I was broke, I committed suicide by jumping off the roof of our golf club in Palm Beach. I had to wait half an hour to jump, I was twelfth in line.” When Madoff shows up for a seafood dinner, the crustacean victims see their chance for revenge.

Life and art intersect in the person of Elie Wiesel, the bard of the Holocaust, who lost all his own and his charities' money. Madoff, he recalls, "presented himself as a philanthropist," and they talked about ethics and education:

"It was a myth that he created around him...the myth of exclusivity...He gave the impression that maybe a hundred people belonged to his club. Now we know thousands of them were cheated by him."

The myth was an echo of the Midas Touch with no memory of the curse that comes with it. Whatever happens to Madoff himself, he is on his way to becoming a symbol of "the stuff that dreams are made on" in the long line of literature from Shakespeare to Sam Spade in "The Maltese Falcon."

Madoff, Jim Cramer and Jon Stewart

The Ponzi scheme perpetrator was in a courtroom yesterday, pleading guilty but offering no explanation of his motives or what happened to the money.

Jim Cramer, who misled investors for years on MSNBC, was on the Daily Show, trying to defend himself against Jon Stewart's indictment of financial "news." Cramer, who built a career as the "wild man" truth teller, was as subdued as Madoff but no more successful in escaping guilt for where Wall Street is today.

Jon Stewart's verdict: "disingenuous at best and criminal at worst." One of today's best journalists, Jim Fallows, who considers Stewart, without hyperbole, the Edward R. Murrow of our time, says that he "without excessive showboating, did the journalistic sensibility proud."

Someone who saw Murrow in his prime has to agree.

Ponzi Bedtime Story?

In a time of falling home prices and trillion-dollar bailouts, one market seems to be up as a young candidate for a master's in family and marriage therapy reports that 10,000 bidders for her virginity have pushed the price to $3.7 million.

Skeptics in the age of Madoff may be forgiven for their doubts about such returns from what these days might be considered a modest investment.

The young woman's enterprise recalls the response of a friend of mine with a large public relations company to young job seekers fresh out of college who would tell him they were ready to sell out.

"That's fine," he would say. "Now what is it exactly that you have to sell?"

These days, the "Buyer Beware" signs are up for everyone, journalists included.

The Myth of the Midas Touch

As the list of victims grows, the Bernard Madoff scandal is proving once again that the easiest prey for get-rich-quick schemes are the rich.

On the PBS News Hour the other night, my old friend Mort Zuckerman, who made billions in real estate and then went into publishing, seemed stunned at the wipeout of $30 million from his charitable fund's investments, which were made by someone he trusted who in turn trusted Madoff.

The same mistake was made by international banks, hedge funds, asset managers, at least one US senator and other money-hungry believers in magic down to the proverbial little old ladies in tennis shoes of Palm Beach, Florida, all of whom deemed it a privilege to be allowed into Madoff's Ponzi scheme, which was showing annual returns of 11 percent and more.

A lifetime of dealing with the very rich has made me suspect that many are one-trick ponies, very good at what brought them wealth, but susceptible of being flattered by flim-flam artists like Madoff, who make them feel smarter than everybody else at maximizing their money (an attitude taken to the extreme by the late Leona Helmsley, who said before going to prison for tax evasion, "Paying taxes is only for the little people.")

The rest of us are more likely to subscribe to the old adage, "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn't" and go our financially paranoid ways.

Now the economic waves have wiped him out and Madoff is under luxury house arrest, as prosecutors try to find out what happened to all that smart money. It's highly unlikely that other predators like him won't be washed up by outgoing tide.