Bernie Madoff
Photograph of Bernie Madoff (right) with his family at his son’s graduation from business school, obtained from The New York Times.
Born April 29, 1938 in Queens, New York, Bernie Madoff watched his father first work as a plumber and then a stockbroker. His Jewish grandparents were emigrants of Poland, Romania, and Austria. When Bernie saw his father’s businesses collapse, he dropped out of law school and worked lifeguarding and installing sprinklers. After helping his family, he used this money to start a small brokerage, Bernard L Madoff Investment Securities in 1960. That penny stock brokerage eventually grew into Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities.
He died in the Federal Correctional Institution Butner Medium near Butner, North Carolina, on April 14, 2021.
Bernie was, at one time, non-executive chairman of the NASDAQ stock market. He married his wife Ruth in 1959, and they created several charitable organizations. A family man, Bernie employed his brother and children in his firm, which became a powerhouse.
Bernie knew tragedy as well as business success. His eldest son, Mark, died by suicide in 2010; his older son Andrew died of lymphoma in 2014. His attorney brother Peter was imprisoned for 8 years.
In February 2020, Bernie was diagnosed with end-stage renal disease; because of his susceptibility to COVID, his lawyers asked for compassionate release. His release was denied.
A positive outcome of Bernie’s financial and legal problems was that the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as major banks, changed their mode of operation to keep others from falling victim to Ponzi schemes.
Nothing sums up the life of this incarcerated financier better than this 1817 poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley. No matter the empire or money or fame, all becomes dust:
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
As with many commemorated in these pages, this man had victims. Some people may not be pleased to see this brief testimony to his life and death. Yet we feel all life is deserving of mourning, and no one should die inside the cement walls, alone and sick. We mourn his loss.
This memorial was written by MOL team member Terri LeClerq with information from reporting by Robert Marchant of Greenwich Time, Brooke Masters of the Financial Times, and Dan Mangan and Jim Forkin of CNBC, as well as the poem “Ozymandius” by Percy Bysshe Shelley.