A monster without parallel

“Bernie Madoff is the most honorable, smart person.”

That’s what his close personal friend, mentor, and surrogate “father,” Norman Levy, said about Madoff—while Madoff was stealing him blind.

As explained in a long and horrifying article in Vanity Fair, Madoff didn’t just steal and destroy the wealth of strangers, or of acquaintances. He destroyed the wealth of his closest, most intimate friends, people with whom he and wife traveled and vacationed, people whom he treated like family. They included his two surrogate fathers, Norman Levy and Carl Shapiro. The latter lost half a billion dollars to Madoff’s fraud, more than any other individual investor.

The Vanity Fair article describes in detail Madoff’s many close personal relationships with the people he robbed.

There has never been anything like this.

This man does not deserve to spend the rest of his life in prison. He deserves to be executed.

Some people have asked me why I have posted so much about Madoff. Do they not see how extraordinary he is? He has added a new volume to the annals of evil.

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Paul K. writes:

Recently it occurred to me that they might have to start calling a “Ponzi scheme” a “Madoff scheme,” because compared to Madoff, Ponzi was a piker. Yesterday, a columnist in a New York paper make the same comment. However, on reflection, I realize that “Madoff” will not work as a generic term for fraud, as the scale of his crime, and of his psychopathic evil, dwarfs what we have ever seen or expect to see again. No other swindler managed to rock the foundations of his nation’s financial system, as I believe he has. I was talking to an investor a few days ago and he said, “You know why the stock market went up? Because Madoff is finally going to jail.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 14, 2009 11:31 AM | Send