This is an amazing article about Madoff's family (his parents were in the securities business -- small time players), his amazing ability to bamboozle a huge number of smart, wealthy people
<snip> It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Along with her $100,000 investment, which, with additional infusions and the fund’s steady returns, grew into millions, Carmen got a new social life. She showed me pictures and told me stories of dinners, family gatherings, charity balls, and Madoff company picnics, held at Madoff’s home in Montauk, on Long Island, where the investment shaman would book every hotel room in the vicinity for his employees and their families. She recalled trips on yachts and outings in New York and evenings in the Madoffs’ house in Palm Beach—12 years of Norman and Carmen and Ruth and Bernie. “The intimacy of those events,” she said with a sigh. “Birthdays. Hanukkahs. Building a yacht for Mr. Levy in the last years of his life …”
<snip> As Christmas turned to New Year’s, the roster of the stricken had ballooned—too many to believe. How the Madoff pox had found its way to the Rockies and spread, however, was still unclear. Bernie had been in Aspen, people said, as had his brother, Peter, but never to solicit blatantly. Soon I knew of approximately 50 investors in Aspen who had been stung. As one of them told me, when the stock market began to slide, they had begun shifting “from the losers to the winners,” until some of them had everything except their houses—which in this town can mean a $10 million asset, frequently pure equity—invested with Madoff. Then, as Madoff kept performing and the market kept going to hell, the house would also go to him.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/04/madoff200904Madoff is a cunning and vicious schemer, clothed in respectable wealth and authenticated by our own wall street culture. People wanted to believe . . . and they were taken.
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