Customer Reviews

The Madoff Chronicles: Inside the Secret World of Bernie and Ruth

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This informative and interesting book includes interviews with a number of people who worked for Bernie Madoff, in particular a chapter devoted exclusively to an interview with Madoff's long-time secretary that's pretty much a tell-all about Madoff and some of the staff.

So many people lost money when they "invested" their funds with Madoff that it is amazing that they and the SEC just ignored the signs of the fraud. The investors and the SEC just did not dig deeply enough to figure out what was going on. Perhaps they just didn't want to. Seems many members of the SEC were just too close to Madoff.

I thought I had read pretty much about the fraud, but while reading this book, the Kindle edition, I realized there was much that I had not known. I was surprised that there were drugs involved, particularly marijuana use by Bernie and his wife Ruth. Bernie used to send his messenger to Spanish Harlem to purchase marijuana, and apparently Ruth Madoff was becoming a serious user of the product.

The book is extremely well written, and I found it hard to put down once I began reading it. I ended up asking how this all could have happened. I'm not an investor, but I read the financial news, thought the SEC could be trusted to follow through as required and do the job of protecting investors. But they failed! The investigator Harry Markopolos was on target when he testified to congress about the Madoff fraud and stated that the SEC wouldn't be able to find ice cream in a Dairy Queen nor steak in an Outback steak restaurant.

I HIGHLY recommend this book and would have given it ten stars were they available.

"The Madoff Chronicles" is an excellent analysis of the Madoff Ponzi Scheme. Rather than try to tell Madoff's life story, it tells the story of the fraud itself. This piece largely succeeds in explaining various dimensions of the fraud, from its essential nature, its effects on the Madoff family, the reasons that Madoff was able to attract so many investors, and the aftermath. This is an engrossing read that I found impossible to put down.

This piece, unlike some others, seems skeptical that the rest of the Madoff clan did not know that he was operating a Ponzi Scheme instead of a legitimate hedge fund. I completely agree with the author. The notion that Ruth, and above all, his two sons, did not know about the fraud is nonsense. They had to have known. More likely Madoff took the fall for his sons, giving them a pretext of deniability. What is indisputable is that the Madoff family lived a life of incredible luxury that is almost unimaginable. And why not? Whenever the Madoffs wanted money, which was often, they simply took their investors' funds, which funds were never invested at all, just kept in the bank for the use of the Madoffs and the odd investor redemption.

The SEC will likely never live down its failure to detect and put a stop to the Madoff fraud. (I am a civil attorney and have brought suit against numerous Ponzi Schemes. Generally you can spot one in about a minute by the uniform returns of over about ten percent. I've never been wrong yet applying this rule. That the SEC missed this for decades, despite several warnings, is inconceivable--the Madoff scam fit right into this rule.) Madoff's fraud ended only as a result of the 2008 financial crisis. When many of his investors sought to redeem their accounts, there was no money, and the whole house of cards came crashing down. No thanks to the SEC.

The securities industry will be years in adjusting to the weaknesses and failures in the system that the Madoff fraud revealed. This piece provides a valuable insight into the problems that somehow we must solve. Highly recommended. RJB.

Brian Ross gives an excellent account of the Madoff scandal. But his background in TV news shows through his writing in some really annoying ways. First, I got the impression that the chapters were meant to be stand-alone narratives or that the book was not written to be read from beginning to end but however you saw fit. This isn't really the case, but you do get the feeling that you've just come back from a commercial break after the beginning of each chapter. A lot of information is presented again (e.g. "Little Rick" is cited as one of Ross' sources several times. Each time he is described as "Little Rick, the Madoff firm's messenger...". This is not the only example and the book is only about 230 pages plus an appendix.). Another TV news trope is the gotcha line. There are several instances where Ross tells us something trivial about Madoff which allows him to insert a line that reads like dialog from a re-run of Dragnet (e.g. there is no reason for Ross to tell us that Madoff was once a Boy Scout, except, apparently, to remind us that he failed to keep himself "morally straight." Well, duh!). Finally, Ross needs some variation. There is one page in the last chapter which cites sources "close" to "Ruth," "her" (Ruth) and "the Madoff family." I can see that Ross may want to keep a source anonymous, but a little variation in this would be nice.

I came away knowing more about the whole scandal after having read this book but I think it could have been better edited.

I enjoyed the MADOFF CHRONICLES because it was a complex subject presented in an easy-to-read format. It was actually a page turner. I wanted to know about the personalities behind the scenes, the motivations, the personal histories; Brian Ross's work captured, and capsulized that information succinctly and clearly. I would recommend this book to the lay person, and to someone looking for a fascinating, fast read into the mind and motivations of one of our country's greatest betrayers. I don't know how Madoff ever slept with himself or how he sleeps now. After reading Ross's book, I now understand the extent of what he did.

When I was growing up in Greenwich, Connecticut, our neighbors all seemed to have hedges and stone walls. Now some of them have hedge funds and are stonily silent about Bernie Madoff. It's hard to tell how many people in this town have been ruined by Madoff's Ponzi scheme, but I'll bet there are plenty. Brian Ross's "The Madoff Chronicles" is a good first look at how things went wrong.

Madoff, himself, wondered why he hadn't been caught earlier...a point about which the author sounds as bewildered as any reader of his book... but Ross also lays blame on those who should have been more vigilant. The SEC, for instance, was conned and seduced by Madoff more than once, as was one of his biggest "feeders", the Fairfield Greenwich Group. Ross often seems to ask more questions than he answers but this decades-old crime is still unfolding and a follow-up book should be in order. He offers a crisp narrative and is good at explaining the relationships of those around Bernie Madoff. I was fascinated by the whole seventeenth/nineteenth floor set-up and how, for the most part, one hand really didn't appear to know what the other hand was doing. There are some fascinating paragraphs about how Madoff's personality allowed this scheme to continue for decades and one comes away from this book with a pretty clear understanding of the players and their connections with each other.

I highly recommend "The Madoff Chronicles" and compliment Brian Ross for his investigative work. One wonders how many other Ponzis are out there now and how much more vigilant those who can stop these things from happening again have learned from the Bernie Madoff years.

Should "Ponzi scheme" be called "Madoff scheme" now. It's tragic. For now Madoff serves life in jail. His victims suffer; some go broke. His families too perhaps broken. But what happens to authority people who could have prevented all this. About the book, many interesting facts that could help investors learn to be responsible for themselves.

I however have reservations about the author's using a FBI agent's account to label Madoff as an antisocial personality, also using drug addict Little Rick to angle his personal life. On a light side, the author has confused me with a small fact, that could put the credibility of other facts in question. The author cited Madoff deposited the money in Fidelity Spartan US Treasury MM, and wronged him for lying because such MM fund no longer existed, according to the author, but converted or changed name to Fidelity Fund. How a money market fund (that keeps constant $1 per share) could become a stock fund named Fidelity Fund, one of many Fidelity stock funds and opened since 1930 -- something missing here.

The book is about what he said, we want to know what she (Madoff) said, for completeness. I doubt we would ever know the truth about Madoff.

Personally, I would've liked more depth. This book was a superficial tale based mostly on BM's personal secretary account of what went on. Or what she thought was going on. It just needed to dig deeper.

Enjoyed the book and read it in 2 nights - very easy read. Interesting to understand what this reporter thought of Bernie and his operation. Bernie had a real talent - of manipulation - within his group of friends, colleagues and his own family.
Great overall understanding of what happened and how even "the experts" couldn't catch this little guy!

I think "Chronicles" plus "Too Good to Be True" jointly do the best job of the current Madoff book crop in covering the subject, particularly if your main interest is a more detailed treatment of how the scheme was actually worked, and how the regulators missed the boat.

As I read Ross' account of Bernie Madoff's misadventures, I was struck by how much was missing from the pages. I would have been more interested in how Madoff actually committed the fraud. All one hears about is the dealings on the mysterious "17th floor." I understand that in many ways, Madoff was trading on his reputation and that many, including the SEC, gave him undue credibility.

I would want to read the detailed account of what, how, and why the SEC was doing during this. That is the real story of misadventure. Those who had invested with Madoff had to have a fair amount of money for him to "allow" them in on his scheme. Anyone who thinks they will make 12-20% consistently is naive. The American taxpayer expects due diligence from the SEC; that did not happen.