June 29, 2009

Here’s a story I neglected to mention last week from The New York Times. It concerns the Vatican’s observatory in Arizona—I once met a priest/researcher from there—and it opens with what the Times’ reporter must have thought was a surprisingly worldly scene:

Fauré’s “Requiem” is playing in the background, followed by the Kronos Quartet. Every so often the music is interrupted by an electromechanical arpeggio — like a jazz riff on a clarinet — as the motors guiding the telescope spin up and down. A night of galaxy gazing is about to begin at the Vatican’s observatory on Mount Graham.

The headline for this story was “Vatican’s Celestial Eye, Seeking Not Angels but Data.” Yeah, I know that’s a bit ridiculous: No telescope is going to revealing angels traveling to and from heaven, and I don’t know anyone stupid enough to believe it might. But the story is worth reading.

An excerpt is after the jump:

Bernard Madoff, the now infamous conman who admitted to running the biggest Ponzi scheme in American history, was sentenced this morning to 150 years in prison. That’s the maximum, and it pretty much guarantees that the 71-year-old disgraced financier will die in prison.

More from The New York Times:

Judge Denny Chin turned aside Mr. Madoff’s own assertions of remorse and rejected the suggestion from Mr. Madoff’s lawyers that there was a sense of “mob vengeance” surrounding calls for a long prison term.

“Objectively speaking, the fraud here was staggering,” the judge said. “It spanned more than 20 years.”

The sentencing came at the end of a 90-minute hearing in which victims told a packed courtroom that the judge should show no mercy and Mr. Madoff himself stood up from the defense table to acknowledge the damage he had inflicted and express regret.

“I’m responsible for a great deal of suffering and pain, I understand that,” Mr. Madoff told the court. “I live in a tormented state now, knowing all of the pain and suffering that I’ve created. I’ve left a legacy of shame, as some of my victims have pointed out, to my family and my grandchildren.”

Addressing his victims seated in the courtroom, he said: “I will turn and face you. I’m sorry. I know that doesn’t help you.”

It didn’t help Madoff either.

This saga, of course, is not over. The spotlight recently shifted to Madoff’s enablers, to what the money managers who directed funds his way knew and didn’t know. Last week, the SEC sued Beverly Hills investment guru Stanley Chais, a prominent giver to Jewish causes, and for others for allegedly propping Madoff up; the month before, the court-appointed trustee liquidating Madoff’s firm sued Chais, who he claimed was the first name in Bernad L. Madoff Investment Securities Inc’s speed dial. Chais was also reportedly under criminal investigation.

Chais has proclaimed his innocence, and has repeatedly stated that if he’d known Madoff was running a scam, he wouldn’t have kept his own money and his family’s money with him. One of the family members who lost everything when the house of cards collapses was a 75-year-old Santa Monica retiree:

“My personal theory is that he started as a legitimate investor,” Braslau said of Madoff. “He was a real genius. But then this recession happened, and people started asking for their money and he reverted to this Ponzi scheme. It doesn’t really matter, for those of us hoping to recover our money, when he started. There’s no money left.”

“The chance of us recovering any money, I think, is less than zero.”

“Ruth Madoff: Homeless and without a hairdresser as husband gets 150 years in jail.”

Poor Ruth.

Earlier this month, The New York Times wrote in a profile of Ruth Madoff that “she has become perhaps the most vilified spouse of a financial rogue in history.” The Times continued in “The Loneliest Woman in New York”:

life was also ruined. Although no evidence has emerged to date that she conspired or even knew about her husband’s crimes, her plight has evoked no apparent public sympathy. She has been pilloried and turned into a pariah.

The wives of other notorious criminals, like Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken and Nicholas Leeson, endured rough social sledding but eventually emerged with new careers and new friends. It’s not as if they couldn’t still go out and have their hair done. There wasn’t quite the same pack of gleeful tabloid photographers as there was, say, when Mrs. Madoff bought cheese in the supermarket a few months ago.

By contrast, the public reaction to Mrs. Madoff has been white hot and vitriolic. Rightly or wrongly, she is viewed as an unrepentant beneficiary of ill-gotten wealth, a petite and well-dressed embodiment of the collective, bloated greed that helped topple the stock market and the housing industry.

“She’s perceived as the succubus to Bernie’s incubus,” said Prof. Richard A. Shweder, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Chicago. “She was inside a circle of people whose wealth has been sucked out of the system.”

The evidence: Ruth Madoff’s high-brow hairdresser told her to get her highlights elsewhere. And now, according to the the New York Post, Madoff, who last week agreed with federal prosecutors to sell their Manhattan apartment, can’t find a room for rent. No landlords want her; even using her maiden name isn’t helping.

“She has nowhere to go,” a broker told the Post. “No one wants someone with her name in their building. People like their privacy.”

Billy Mays, the greatest pitchman since Ron Popeil, was found dead Saturday at his home in Tampa. Mays was 50, the same age as Michael Jackson, but I’ve got to say his death much more saddening.

Mays wasn’t a pop culture icon, though his beard was inspiring, but his death, likely of heart failure, was a lot less expected than the King of Pop’s.

Mays was best-known for promoting OxiClean, but I always imagined he would have been an amazing street preacher.

Inquiring minds have wanted to know since Election Day where the Obamas would attend church. This morning Time magazine offered an answer:

Now, in an unexpected move, Obama has told White House aides that instead of joining a congregation in Washington, D.C., he will follow in George W. Bush’s footsteps and make his primary place of worship Evergreen Chapel, the nondenominational church at Camp David.

A number of factors drove the decision — financial, political, personal — but chief among them was the desire to worship without being on display. Obama was reportedly taken aback by the circus stirred up by his visit to 19th Street Baptist in January. Lines started forming three hours before the morning service, and many longtime members were literally left out in the cold as the church filled with outsiders eager to see the new President. Even at St. John’s, which is so accustomed to presidential visitors that it is known as the “Church of the Presidents,” worshippers couldn’t help themselves from snapping photos of Obama on their camera phones as they walked down the aisle past him to take communion.

Amy Sullivan’s report for Time has not, however, been confirmed. David Brody, CBN’s well-connected political correspondent, quotes the White House deputy press secretary saying, “The President and First Family continue to look for a church home. They have enjoyed worshipping at Camp David and several other congregations over the months, and will choose a church at the time that is best for their family.”

Regardless of where the Obama’s are heading for Sunday worship, the most interesting part of Sullivan’s story is this tidbit about the pastor at Evergreen:

Camp David’s current chaplain, Lieut. Carey Cash, leads the services at Evergreen. If the White House had custom-ordered a pastor to be the polar opposite of Jeremiah Wright, they could not have come as close as Cash. (As it is, the White House had no hand in selecting Cash. The Navy rotates chaplains through Camp David every three years; Cash began his tour this past January.) The 38-year-old Memphis native is a graduate of the Citadel and the great-nephew of Johnny Cash. He served a tour as chaplain with a Marine battalion in Iraq and baptized nearly 60 Marines during that time. Cash earned his theology degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth — and, yes, that means Obama’s new pastor is a Southern Baptist.

I heard over the weekend, as most sports fans did, that one of the great Iowa high school football coaches, a man who helped rebuild his small town after a tornado ripped through and killed nine, was gunned down as he supervised weightlifting for some of his players. Ed Thomas was something of a legend, and he was allegedly shot dead by a former player with a drug problem whom he repeatedly tried to help.

But what I didn’t know until reading this phenomenal story from Yahoo! Sports is that Thomas’ murder is actually a religion story:

In recent months, Thomas had tried to counsel his alleged killer at the request of the young man’s family, which attends the same church where Thomas served as an elder, and where the coach’s wife and two grown sons accepted condolences on Sunday during visitation. Some stood in a line that stretched for six blocks, four and five people abreast, for 4-1/2 hours to honor the coach. A handful of men pulled red wagons with coolers filled with bottled water that they passed out to those waiting.

On Monday, the silver-colored casket was lowered into the grave, which one current and two former players helped dig. More than 2,000 came to pay their respects, including Iowa Gov. Chet Culver and University of Iowa football coach Kirk Ferentz. About 700 squeezed into First Congregational Church, 700 more watching the service on closed-circuit TV at the Veterans Memorial Building, five blocks away, and scores outside the building, listening to the service via speaker.

The pall bearers included four current NFL players who learned the game under Thomas at Aplington-Parkersburg – or A-P as they call it around here. Many still wonder how four corn-fed boys from a town of 1,900 made it to the NFL within the same decade. The players – Jared DeVries, a defensive end for the Detroit Lions; Aaron Kampman, a defensive end for the Green Bay Packers; Brad Meester, a center for the Jacksonville Jaguars; and Casey Wiegmann, a center for the Denver Broncos – credit the work ethic in Parkersburg and Thomas.

His murder will test this community in a way no natural disaster could.

Hinders, a God-fearing man in a God-fearing town, is among residents who believe it’s no accident the tornado spared all eight churches in Parkersburg. Nor does he believe it’s a coincidence that Thomas – a man known as much for his deep faith in Christianity as for his two state championships and record of 292-84 over 37 seasons – was gunned down.

“You couldn’t pick anybody bigger in this town to shoot,” said Hinders, 60, who has been the town clerk here for 27 years. “That’s evil. …

“It’s spiritual warfare. Satan and God are fighting, and in the end I believe God will win.”

Thomas’ alleged killer, Mark Becker, 24, attended the church where Thomas was an elder. Unlike with Phillip Markoff, no one is asking “Is Mark Becker Christian?” Witnesses claim, though, that he could be heard screaming as he ran to his car: “Make sure Satan knows! Satan’s gotta know!”