Greg Newton introduces an interesting article on Madoff, The Monster Mensch, by Steve Fishman in New York Magazine.
Psychosociopathology 101
Courtesy of Greg Newton at NakedShorts
In the sublime structure Ezra Merkin had built for himself, money was the mother of beauty and refinement. The actual business of making it amounted to a kind of plumbing, a slightly unseemly necessity, about which it was best not to go into details. Men like Teicher, or Bernie Madoff, could roll up their sleeves and make it flow, and you could take your cut, without getting your fingernails dirty. The details mattered less as long as the money kept flowing. The fact that Ezra had a blind spot for the way his money was actually being made—and in this he was not so different from many others during the boom years, even his own clients—functioned as a kind of soft corruption, which could enable the hard corruption of Bernie Madoff.
The Monster Mensch
What made Bernie Madoff, a man who helped revolutionize Wall Street and built a completely legal billion-dollar business, perpetrate the greatest fraud in history? And what led Ezra Merkin, born to immense privilege, to enable him?
A little more than a year before he blithely confessed to masterminding the largest Ponzi scheme in history, Bernie Madoff attended the wedding of his niece. That Saturday evening, September 29, 2007, Shana Madoff, the daughter of his younger brother, Peter, his partner for almost four decades at Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, married a former official at the Securities and Exchange Commission, an irony that Bernie couldn’t quite keep to himself. He tossed an arm around the neck of one young guest and directed the young man’s attention across the dance floor, toward a clean-cut group sipping cocktails. “See them,” Madoff said, pale-blue eyes flashing incongruously in his kindly face. “That’s the enemy.”
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