Madoff with the Money

Acknowledgments

Bernie who?

He was someone few had ever heard of, who had committed a monstrous crime no one had been aware of.

But after his story began unfolding following his arrest in December 2008, Bernie Madoff became a household name overnight, the ultimate poster boy for extreme Wall Street greed, and the most reviled and cunning crook America and the world had ever come face-to-face with. He was compared to one of those psychopathic serial killers who murder anonymously, live among us, and are loved and respected by their friends and associates until someone comes across the bodies buried in the backyard.

In Bernie's case, the financial victims numbered in the thousands and his take was in the billions of dollars. Besides losing life savings, two of his investors had taken their lives. There was blood on his hands.

When the Madoff story broke—and headlines about his massive Ponzi scheme blared around the globe, for his victims were everywhere—I had just completed writing an expose of a company called Toy Monster: The Big, Bad World of Mattel, my ninth book.

While I was quite aware of the exploding scandal, my focus still was on Toy Monster, which had taken more than a year of intensive reporting and writing. But in late January to early February 2009 I was convinced that the story of Bernie's amazing rise and calamitous fall was a business crime story of historic proportions, and I dove into research and reporting.

As I stated in the Prologue, my goal was to tell the ...