Into his 40s, Behar had periodically benefited from the largesse of his multimillionaire aunt, who he’d esteemed as a savvy investor. Now, as he learned from his cousin, she’d gone bust. She’d been scammed, like thousands of others, by a man who had been arrested in December 2008 but Behar had not heard of until then: Bernie Madoff.
His cousin’s call the day after Madoff’s arrest set Behar on a decade-and-a-half-long quest — both before and after Madoff’s death in 2021. His search for answers about the notorious architect of a $68 billion Ponzi scheme became a sort of Bernie and Me saga that spanned dozens of phone conversations stretched over nearly 10 years beginning in 2011; hundreds of emails; and multiple visits to the North Carolina prison where Madoff was serving a 150-year sentence.
Their conversations and voluminous written correspondence form the basis of Behar’s first book, “Madoff: The Final Word,” which Avid Reader Press will publish Tuesday. It is a deeply reported and occasionally overwhelmingly detailed examination of Madoff’s motives and methods that includes fresh insights from FBI agents and former prosecutors who sought to bring the fraudster to justice.
The Bernie Madoff who emerges from Behar’s extraordinary access and hours of phone calls is not just vain and delusional, but also a profane, tiresome, self-absorbed bore, endlessly droning on about his legacy, casting blame on others and pumping up a set of laughably dubious accomplishments.
Over a recent lunch in Midtown Manhattan, Behar recounted his growing annoyance as the years went along whenever Madoff called: “Why always on a Friday? I’m not in the mood. Towards the end of our 10-year relationship, I wouldn’t even answer.”
Before Madoff’s death in prison, at 82, Behar came to think of his years of listening to Madoff’s “bunkum,” as he calls it, as a kind of prison sentence, metaphorically akin to the term being served by his subject.
“This book marks my escape,” Behar writes. “At least one of us made it out.”
Behar — a contributing editor at Forbes who previously served on the staffs of Fortune and Time — was accustomed to exploring man’s worst impulses. He’d profiled another decade’s Ponzi schemer, Dennis Helliwell; chased terrorists in Pakistan; and probed the dealings of Russian organized-crime figures and New York mafiosos. (He lamented taking me to a less-than-atmospheric Midtown restaurant instead of a “mob hangout” Italian joint he frequents that he said would have been more on-brand.)
Behar writes that Madoff was a “financial cannibal” and a “pathological liar.” But in their talks, the two men sometimes found common ground, including their opinion that Madoff’s sentence after pleading guilty to 11 felony charges, including securities fraud and money laundering, was overly harsh.
“What was surprising was that I found myself agreeing with him,” Behar writes. “He hadn’t killed anyone.”
They were most in sync when it came to their take on the clients who had reaped suspiciously hefty returns from their Madoff investments before the Ponzi scheme collapsed.
Behar read aloud to me one snippet from his conversations with Madoff that he considers particularly convincing: “Quite frankly,” Madoff said, “one thing I’ve been convinced of is that everybody has a very selective memory. Everybody just only wants to think about what I did to them. No one wants to take any blame that their greed contributed to this.”
Behar, a 63-year-old with a thick head of curly white hair that juts high off his forehead, paused for a moment to let Madoff’s words sink in.
“He has a point,” he said.
Behar, refreshingly, turns out to be a bit of a contrarian, questioning some of the received wisdom about the case and, at the very least, prompting us to consider whether a story prone to reductionism is more nuanced than we thought — whether we buy his arguments or not.
That New York magazine cover calling Madoff a “monster” and portraying him as a grinning villain straight out of a Batman movie? Madoff didn’t necessarily deserve to become the “human face of the entire financial crisis,” Behar writes, at a time when the country was convulsing from the subprime-mortgage meltdown.
The idea that the Securities and Exchange Commission dropped the ball by not catching on to Madoff? Behar and Madoff share the view that the regulators “had been blamed unfairly.” Behar notes that the agency is chronically understaffed and flooded with more tips than it can handle; he also takes the position — sure to be controversial — that the widely referenced narrative of the SEC ignoring complaints about Madoff from a whistleblower is oversimplified.
As he was about to begin investigating Madoff, Behar figured he should also investigate himself. Shortly after Madoff’s arrest, Behar did a Google search about a financial adviser who manages a retirement account for him. It took only a few minutes to discover that the man had a financial felony on his record from many years earlier, Behar told me, recounting an anecdote that is not in his book. Behar called the adviser, talked it through and decided to stick with him.
Behar initially reached out to Madoff in 2009, a few months after the admitted fraudster’s arrest. But he didn’t hear back until two years later. When they first met in 2011 at the federal prison in Butner, N.C., Behar got a glimpse of the “special power” that allowed Madoff to seduce investors.
“Bernie’s hands were soft,” Behar writes. “His face betrayed no sign of the carnage he’d left behind. I felt the sudden urge to hug and comfort him.”
As time went along, Behar concluded that Madoff was lying about matters both large and small. Ever the grifter, Madoff sometimes poor-mouthed Behar into paying for his email access and vending machine snacks, even though he had a well-funded prison bank account.
In prison, Madoff — who’d once luxuriated on an 88-foot yacht named “Bull” equipped with a buoy called “Bullship” — worked in the kitchen. He sun-tanned in the prison yard and hung out with the mafia bosses Carmine Persico and Nicky Scarfo, fellow inmates whom he described to Behar as “terrific guys.” Amusingly, in light of Madoff’s serial deceptions, he didn’t care for another inmate, the spy Jonathan Pollard, because he considered him a “phony.”
Madoff nicknamed himself “the Wizard of Wall Street,” and other examples of his self-aggrandizement included boasting about banking executives who prostrated themselves before him as he funneled billions through a Chase account.
“They just wanted to kiss the ring,” he said.
Madoff stuck to his story that his wife, Ruth, and his sons, Mark and Andrew, weren’t involved in the Ponzi scheme.
“After a while, you start [lying to] yourself to believe what you want to believe. ‘I’m gonna get out of this mess,’” he told Behar. “And then you just block it out of your mind. I was going nuts. Sixteen years of doing this [scheme]. Not telling your wife and sons. I don’t know how I stood the stress. There must be something wrong with me to be able to handle the pressure.”
Even after 15 years obsessing over the case, Behar can’t say for sure what was wrong with Madoff. It’s laudable that he doesn’t speculate or jump to conclusions, as others have. Still, I craved a straightforward answer to that question from this seasoned financial reporter. I was left with the feeling that if Behar can’t say for sure, perhaps we’ll never know.
However, Behar does present enough nuggets of information to raise some eyebrows about Ruth and her sons: She “lied like a mobster” in a “60 Minutes” interview, saying she hadn’t been a bookkeeper for her husband’s business since the 1960s when, in fact, there were financial documents, some with her handwriting on them, that show she maintained bank accounts related to the Ponzi scheme. The sons participated in “a massive document-shredding party” to destroy evidence sought by the SEC and were well-educated professional traders who got rich off the proceeds from the Ponzi scheme, even though they worked in a separate part of the business.
“They most certainly should have known about a lot of wrongdoing,” Behar writes.
(Behar writes that Ruth Madoff now resides in an assisted-living facility; Mark Madoff took his own life in 2010 on the second anniversary of his father’s arrest; Andrew Madoff died from cancer in 2014. None of them were ever charged.)
As news was breaking about Madoff’s history-making crimes, Behar’s Aunt Adele remained remarkably circumspect. Her $6 million account was a worthless illusion, as were the accounts that had supposedly grown to $10 million that she’d set up for friends and her children.
Still, Adele, who died in 2016 at age 88, called Madoff “My Little Gonif,” invoking a Yiddish word.
“A gonif steals someone’s lollypop but does it cutely,” she explained to her nephew. “Richard, it’s only money, a false measurement of something.”
It dawned on Behar that Madoff was responsible for money he’d received over the years from his aunt — $20,000 for a down payment on an apartment he bought in the early 1990s and $4,000 years later for furniture. Shortly before Madoff’s arrest, Adele also gave her nephew money to cover his medical expenses after he was afflicted by a life-threatening parasite while reporting a magazine story in Africa.
“Parasite Bernie helped get rid of my African parasite,” Behar writes.
I asked Behar whether he felt any guilt or remorse about benefiting financially from ill-gotten gains. An editor had once quipped that Behar “has never learned a fact that he hasn’t had to stew on for a month.” Contemplating my question, he started to knead his forehead and run through a logic chain — almost as if I weren’t sitting there beside him.
“I had tainted money that benefited me.”
“I should do something.”
“I don’t know what.”
“I should make some donations.”
“I have to give this some thought.”
“I had no control over the situation, but there’s no question I was gifted tainted money.”
“This didn’t occur to me in that way.”
Two days later he texted me to say that he wanted to talk some more and that he’d been mulling the subject of “complicity (personal and societal) in the worst aspects of the financial system.”
Receiving money — even unknowingly — that was the fruit of a crime was not congruent with the way he lived his life and conducted his career, he said. The kernel of an idea was forming in his head to volunteer to teach financial literacy classes to school kids — maybe he could impart some wisdom that would help them.
But what he won’t be able to do is ever fully explain the man who set in motion a chain of events that destroyed the finances of thousands and even prompted him to wrestle with something as innocuous as a gift from a loving aunt.
Despite all the time that Behar and the Ponzi mastermind spent communicating with each other, Madoff remained an enigma. In a sense, Madoff is still pulling a fast one on us all.
“There may never be a final word,” Behar writes, “on what made Bernie Bernie.”
Manuel Roig-Franzia is a Washington Post staff writer and a former bureau chief for The Post in Miami and Mexico City.
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