Victims of Bernard Madoff?s massive Ponzi scam are still waiting to get back money back. Billions are tied up in litigation, and there?s no resolution in sight.
As we progress ever further into the hall of mirrors that is the Madoff case, the sights become ever more confusing, the stories more sordid and more fascinating. Nobody, apparently, is what he seems.
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 Magazine’s Steve Fishman writes what is, perhaps, the best character study to date of both Bernard Madoff and the disgraced investor and Madoff enabler J. Ezra Merkin. The article, at times sympathetic, delves deep into the psyches of both men — pulling up new information about Madoff ‘s class resentment, and about what led Merkin to cast his lot with the alleged Ponzi schemer.
In the wake of L’Affaire Madoff, writer Daphne Merkin, the sister of investor J. Ezra Merkin — his Ascot Partners fund had invested most all of its $1.8 billion with Madoff — bemoans in The Daily Beast the general invisibility of women in the world of finance. Without naming names, she writes of the limited role of the “enabling wives who serve as silent business partners or facilitating daughters … serving as an advancing flotilla of social connections.” Discussing her own meager fiscal education, she writes: