You may have missed Madoff on ABC this week. It’s four hours on the life of the fraudster, portrayed by Richard Dreyfuss. If you have a few hours this weekend, it’s worth watching. Mr. Dreyfuss does a great job portraying Madoff, capturing him lying, cheating and stealing, but looking upstanding in the eyes of his…
Tag: Madoff
How Do You Exit a Ponzi Scheme?
It looks like Bernie Madoff was $45 billion short of funds in his “investment strategy.” How was he ever going to get out of this? The original Ponzi schemer, Charles Ponzi, seems to think he could get out of his situation, at least according to Mitchell Zukoff, author of Ponzi’s Scheme: The True Story of…
The Monsters of Compliance – Dracula
The pumpkins and garish Halloween decorations are out on my front lawn. With the Halloween season upon us, my mind has become stuck on movie monsters and been mixed with compliance. This is the terrible result. Vampires have taken many forms, mixing mythologies, weaknesses and desires. There is the regal version played by Bela Lugosi,…
Lance Armstrong – A Lying Liar Just Like Madoff
It’s tough to see a hero fall. I didn’t consider Lance Armstrong to be a hero for riding. But what he did for cancer survivors was remarkable. Until recently, cycling was filthy with doping. Take a look at the podium finishers for the Tour de France. Only two of the podium finishers in the Tour…
The Echoes of Madoff at the SEC
The Madoff scandal is one of the low points in the history of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Every Congressional hearing or SEC-basher inevitably uses the failure to catch Madoff as evidence of the ineffectiveness of the SEC. In a continuing journey down the rabbit hole, the SEC’s Inspector General David Kotz released his 123-page…
Is Madoff a Sociopath?
The New York magazine interview with Bernie Madoff has finally been published. Steve Fishman spoke with Madoff on the phone (collect calls from Madoff’s prison) for several hours. And so, sitting alone with his therapist, in the prison khakis he irons himself, he seeks reassurance. “Everybody on the outside kept claiming I was a sociopath,”…
Save Your Company, Save Yourself
What happens when you have a business disaster on your resume? Maybe listing an Enron or WorldCom would not be so bad. Those companies are big enough that you may not be tainted by the corporate fraud. Unless you ended up in handcuffs. As the company gets smaller, you’re more likely to get caught in…
The New Face of Evil?
His crime was simple: collect money from investors, fake the returns, pocket the money, and repeat. His crime was the biggest: $20 billion in cash plus $45 billion of fake returns. Should Bernie Madoff be the new name for evil? Christine Hurt of University of Illinois College of Law contrasts Madoff with the original Ponzi…
Dealing with Losses From the Madoff Fraud
One of the many repercussions of the Madoff fraud is how to treat investors who had money in his Ponzi scheme. There has been plenty written about how the trustee is treating the direct investors. He is only treating net cash. If you took out more cash than you put in, you are on the…
Madoff Losses Down from $65 Billion to $20 Billion
How do you value fraud? When the Madoff ponzi scheme collapsed the claim was that there was $65 billion in losses. That was the total dollar value on the account statements given to investors. Of course, that number was fictional because there were not real assets behind those numbers. The trustee overseeing the liquidation of…