Quotes from Diana B. Henriques

In a world full of lies, the most dangerous ones are those we tell ourselves.

What went wrong was their rejection of basic bedrock principles of investing—that high returns are leg-shackled to high risks; that you should never put all your eggs in one basket; that you should never invest in something you cannot understand. They failed to see that no one should hand all their money over to anyone simply because they trust him, or because someone they admire trusts him.

Madoff was not inhumanly monstrous. He was monstrously human. He was greedy for money and praise, arrogantly sure of his own capacity to pull it off, smugly dismissive of skeptics—just like anyone who mortgaged the house to invest in tech stocks, or tapped the off-limits college fund to gamble on a new business, or put all the retirement savings into a hedge fund they didn't understand, or cheated a little on the tax return or the expense account or the spouse.

They had encountered fraud cases, even Ponzi schemes, before. But they had never faced anything on this scale. The tally of customer losses was staggering, and the victims were spread around the globe.

Judge Chin found no mitigating factors. "In a white-collar fraud case such as this, I would expect to see letters from family and friends and colleagues. But not a single letter has been submitted attesting to Mr. Madoff's good deeds or good character or civic or charitable activities. The absence of such support is telling." Given Madoff's age, Judge Chin acknowledged that any sentence above twenty years was effectively a life sentence.

Then came Black Monday, October 19, 1987, when the bottom simply fell out. A record-cracking 600 million shares were traded on the Big Board that day, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 508 points—a 22.6 percent fall, more than twice the damage inflicted on the worst day of the historic 1929 crash. The S&P 500 dropped almost as far, just as fast.

DiPascali, a small terrier-like man with the unpolished speech of his native Queens, came through for Madoff. Using self-taught computer skills and the historical stock and options prices available to any brokerage firm, he created a convincing paper trail covering several years of complex trading activity that almost certainly had never occurred.

René-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet,

The one thing he has no intention of doing, however, is investing the $10 million check so that it can generate money to cover hardworking union members' pensions in the years to come. He pours it into the river of cash that nourishes his fraud and benefits his family, as he has done so many times before.