Quotes About Madoff

When my wife's sister passed away, Bernie Madoff came to the funeral. That was the type of individual that we all thought he was - a very caring individual.

Even powerful politicians, like New York Senator Chuck Schumer (much more later on this) were not enough to protect Mr. Madoff when the news about his fraud became a "national event." Although Bernie contributed money to the New York Congressmen and Senators, he made relatively few contributions (payoffs) to national

Some people are in positions of power, and when incentives go haywire, we are all human and it's easy to make mistakes. I am not saying everybody is Bernie Madoff.

Bernie Madoff is probably more nuanced then I'm giving him credit for, but I just couldn't get under his skin.

There are tons of examples of U.K. and European mistakes. A classic one is pensions. That's obviously not an America-specific thing. The British and European economies are suffering under the weight of what is to come. The next great Ponzi scheme after Madoff is probably pensions.

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.

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.

The youthful SEC staffers were so dazzled to be at Madoff headquarters that they occasionally inquired about job openings at the company. "They would say, 'Can we get jobs—can we give you our résumés?'" Solomon said. "We'd say, 'Send them through to our offices.' A couple of them dropped résumés off." The secretary was appalled. "No wonder they never found anything," she said.

Madoff received so many death threats that he started wearing a bulletproof vest to his court appearances. Protestors sometimes gathered outside his apartment building, including an angry Wall Street trader who arrived on January 14 with a huge sign reading, "Bernie, it's not too late to do the right thing: JUMP!

Largely incomprehensible: Madoff's staff of high school–educated clerks facilitated the Ponzi scheme for 40 years without a single one ever realizing it was a Ponzi scheme.

Markopolos sees his mistake now, with the benefit of over a decade of hindsight. But in the midst of things, the same brilliant mind that was capable of unraveling Madoff's deceptions was incapable of getting people in positions of responsibility to take him seriously. That's the consequence of not defaulting to truth. If you don't begin in a state of trust, you can't have meaningful social encounters.

First there is default to truth, which gives the con artist a head start. But when you add mismatch to that, it's not hard to understand why Madoff fooled so many for so long.

This phenomenon has been called the wisdom of crowds. But like most simplifications, this has a flip side, as in the Madoff case. Here there were just two answers, fraudster or investment genius. The crowd voted for investment genius and got it wrong. I call the flip side to the wisdom of crowds the lunacy of lemmings.

You can't tell the story of the thousands of people whose lives were destroyed by Bernie Madoff because there are thousands of stories. What you can do is to start inside, and that's the picture that you do, which becomes like a Greek tragedy in that regard - that whole collapse.

Deception can cost billions. Think Enron, Madoff, the mortgage crisis. Or in the case of double agents and traitors, like Robert Hanssen or Aldrich Ames, lies can betray our country. They can compromise our security. They can undermine democracy. They can cause the deaths of those that defend us.

I'm as proud of my work in 'Madoff' as anything I've ever done. Richard Dreyfuss turned in a bravura performance. It went unnoticed.

Our oceans have been the victims of a giant Ponzi scheme, waged with Bernie Madoff-like callousness by the world's fisheries.

My family survived losing money to Bernie Madoff incredibly well compared to others.