Bernie Madoff and the destruction of an American Family

In the movie Wall Street, Oliver Stone told us that "the only thing worse than not having money, is to have had it and lost it." Such is certainly the case with the family of Bernie Madoff. But the question still remains, for this family that lived high on the hog for so long, "what did they know and when did they know it?"

Journalist Laurie Sandell was the first to really get inside the Madoff family and tried to ascertain whether or not we should have any sympathy for Ruth, Mark and Andrew; or should we simply share a sense of schadenfreude for the destruction of this American family. In her new book Truth and Consequences
she spends hours talking to members of the family.

My conversation with Laure Sandell:

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The Wizard of Lies

Much has been made of all the greed that led to the crash of 2008. Much anger has been directed at bankers and investment bankers. Clearly many did engage in highly speculative behavior and skirted grey areas of the investment business. But one man redefined greed.and manipulation on Wall Street. If it was a time of cutting corners, then Bernie Madoff went off the road.

Madoff may have been a crook, but he didn't exist in a vacuum. His behavior reflected the extreme temper of the times on a Wall Street -  a place he helped shape and that he intimately understood. He was not, as  financial journalist Diana Henriques has said, not inhumanly monstrous, but rather monstrously human.

My conversation with New York Times senior financial writer Diana Henriques about her book The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the death of Trust.

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