Previously regarded as a pillar of Wall Street, Madoff is accused of conning more than US$30 billion of dollars out of unsuspecting investors.
Casting the movie
Madoff is the poster child for the year-long financial mess on Wall Street, which has spread throughout the US. Madoff is hardly the only one. The actor playing Madoff would ideally have the chops to play an aging, New York Jewish finance titan. Who will play Bernie Madoff? Dennis Miller comes to mind but they would have to age him a bit to play the roll. Miller could also use the work because few of his shows last much more than a year.
Joan Rivers after her victory on Celebrity Apprentice, would be the perfect wife of Bernie, Ruth Madoff.
A movie about his stranger-than-fiction crash make sense because all the elements for a riveting story are in place. The plot contains suspense, big bucks, New York society, a built-in psychodrama, whistle blowers, office sex, crime, and hundreds of celebrity and ordinary victims on a Wall Street stage .
Book stores will be featuring Madoff's story shortly. Already, Harper Collins has signed up veteran television journalist Andrew Kirtzman to write a book about the disgraced financier. Investigative reporter Richard Behar, who has worked for Time Warner Inc.'s Time and Fortune magazines, will be doing a Madoff book as well for Random House.
The Madoff legacy
Madoff's legacy continues to take on advanced proportions with each passing day and every new bulletin of how he apparently took advantage of the trust of a friend or a charity or a financial institution.
Bernie Madoff was a sexist, ego-maniacal, short-tempered control freak—yet everybody loved him. That is according to his secretary of more than 20 years, Eleanor Squillari who co-authored a 9,000-word article in the June issue of Vanity Fair. He was a typical big city New Yorker.
After spending two months helping the FBI gather evidence against her former boss, Squillari, a 59-year-old mother of two from Staten Island, spilled the beans to MSNBC.
Bernie’s views on stealing
Squillari recalls an unusually prophetic conversation she had with Madoff years earlier, after a client’s secretary had been arrested for embezzlement. “You know, [Bernie] has to take some responsibility for this,” Madoff told Squillari. “He should have been keeping an eye on his books. My wife, Ruth watches the books. Nothing gets by Ruth.”
Squillari says she was surprised when he added: “Well, you know what happens is, it starts out with you taking a little bit, maybe a few hundred, a few thousand, a few hundred thousand, and then you start thinking about stealing millions. You get comfortable with that, and before you know it, it snowballs into something big like stealing billions.”
Bernie’s personality
The way Madoff handled stress was “by saying something nasty: You look terrible. You’re gaining weight. You’re stupid. Are you on the rag today? Who passed gas? I never took anything he said to me personally, because I knew it wasn’t about me, it was about him. By the way he had terrible gas all of time.”
Madoff’s behavior changed drastically in the weeks before his arrest. “He seems to be in a drug induced state,” Squillari told people who walked by his office and saw him staring off into space. He refused to look at his mail, and was constantly meeting with the heads of his feeder funds for Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.
Bernie’s sleazy side
“Bernie was irresistible to women especially when he had his wallet open. He “had a roving eye.” Squillari once caught him perusing the escort ads in the back of a magazine, and he frequently visited massage parlors. He called the 'steam and creams. I guess they served ice cream when the session was over. He was a real perve. ”
Madoff was flirtatious and had a habit of making sexually suggestive remarks: “‘Oh, you know you’re crazy about me,’ he would say to me. Sometimes when he came out of his bathroom, which was diagonal to my desk, he would still be putting his joystick back into his pants. If he saw me shaking my head disapprovingly, he would say, ‘Oh, you know it excites you.’ I’d tell him, ‘Knock it off, Bernie,’ and he’d go, ‘Ah, you still look good.’ Then he’d try to feel me up.”
Bernie’s relationship with his wife
Bernie’s wife, Ruth, “wanted to be perfect for him. She would never allow herself to gain weight or have a hair out of place, and she always kept an eagle eye on him when any females were around. However, “if Bernie said something to Ruth that annoyed her, she’d say, ‘Go screw yourself,’ or ‘I don’t give a shit.’ That’s the way they talked to each other. Then he would bitch slap Ruth.
The operations on the 17th floor, home to the Ponzi scheme
The staff on 17th “were mostly low-level, clerical women, many of them working mothers, who probably made no more than $40,000 a year. They were young and naïve, with no background in finance, so they weren’t able to connect the dots.” The girls called Bernie their pimp and he called them his “hos.”
The aftermath of Bernie’s arrest
In the days after her husband’s arrest, Ruth Madoff called Squillari multiple times and encouraged the secretary to provide her with certain information without notifying the bankruptcy trustees, which Squillari said she couldn’t do. “Instead, I told the FBI what had just happened. I was working for them now, not for Ruth and Bernie Madoff.”
Looking back on things, Squillari believes Madoff meticulously planned for his arrest. She believes he wanted the F.B.I. to find the appointment book he left on his desk, and he wanted his sons to find the $173 million in checks made out to certain employees. He never actually intended to send them out, said Squillari.
“He was a con man until the very end. I'm certain if any of those checks had been cashed, they would all have bounced,” Squillari said.
Madoff's legacy continues to take on advanced proportions with each passing day and every new bulletin of how he apparently took advantage of the trust of a friend or a charity or a financial institution.
The Madoff saga has the potential to be a 2009 take on the themes of corruption, social class and media frenzy. Madoff, preyed upon the Jewish community for his victims because they trusted him so much.
www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-04-21/madoff-the-movie/?cid=topic:mainpromo1
www.marketwatch.com/story/madoff-the-movie-who-should-play-the-satan-of-wall-street
www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/05/06/national/main4997015.shtml
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