Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Life

Merkin’s Legal Woes

There are signs that with Bernard Madoff convicted and jailed for orchestrating an estimated $65 billion Ponzi scheme, the attention is now shifting to the so-called “feeder funds” that supplied Madoff with much of the cash to keep his schemes going. On April 1, the Massachusetts secretary of state sued the Fairfield Greenwich Group. And now, Modern Orthodox scion J. Ezra Merkin is in the crosshairs.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is suing Merkin for funneling funds to Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme allegedly without proper due diligence or the knowledge of his investors. Merkin is also being sued by real estate magnate and publisher Mort Zuckerman, who claims to have lost $40 million with Madoff via Merkin. (Full disclosure: The Forward Association, which owns this newspaper, lost approximately $355,000 through an indirect investment in one of Merkin’s funds.)

The suits will turn the spotlight back onto Merkin, a son German immigrant Hermann Merkin — Hermann founded and funded a number of major New York institutions, including Merkin Hall near Lincoln Center and the Fifth Avenue Synagogue — and brother of Daphne Merkin, a prominent writer. J. Ezra Merkin was on the board of a number of major Modern Orthodox institutions that lost money in the Madoff debacle, including Yeshiva University and the Ramaz day school.

The ongoing legal battles — and the colossal legal fees sure to follow — don’t bode well for Merkin’s world-class collection of paintings by modernist master Mark Rothko.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.