Bernard (Bernie) Madoff, whose $17.5 billion Ponzi scheme victimized major Jewish organizations and thousands of individuals, died Wednesday, April 14 at the federal prison in Butner, North Carolina, while serving a 150-year sentence. He was 82 years old.
When the scandal broke in 2008, the Jewish Journal headlined the story with a piece by Rob Eshman titled, “Is Bernie Madoff Jewish? Very. Oy.” The Jewish Community Foundation, which had invested $18 million with Madoff, was hard hit by the scheme, as were Hollywood luminaries such as Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, actress Zsa Zsa Gabor and broadcaster Larry King.
Other American victims included Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, pitcher Sandy Koufax, Orthodox Jewish day schools on the East Coast and Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Thousands of smaller investors also took it on the chin, including this Journal reporter.
Madoff was born April 29, 1938, in Queens, New York, where his father worked as a plumber and stockbroker. With extensive ties in the Jewish communities of New York and Florida — serving, for instance, as trustee of Yeshiva University — Madoff worked his classic Ponzi swindle by offering unusually high returns, with early investors paid off with money from later investors.
One predictable result of Madoff’s arrest and confession was an outpouring of anti-Semitic content on the Internet. The Forward took such attacks seriously and presented its readers with a lengthy questionnaire, asking, for instance, whether the scandal had affected their faith in Judaism and Jewish organizations.
The tragedy of the Madoff clan extended to his two sons. Madoff’s older son, Mark, committed suicide, and Andrew, the younger, died of Lymphoma at age 48.
Bernard Madoff is survived by Ruth Madoff, his wife of 62 years.
