Madoff: The Final Word
Summary
Richard Behar spent more than a decade on this book, including correspondence and interviews with Bernard Madoff before his death in 2021, and access to family members, employees and investigators. It arrives long after the standard accounts and sets out to correct them.
Behar's principal claims concern chronology and knowledge. He argues that the fraud began considerably earlier than the accounts based on Madoff's guilty plea suggest, and he examines the evidence about what Madoff's brother, sons and wife knew and when. He reconstructs the operation of the seventeenth floor at 885 Third Avenue, where the fabricated trading records were produced, and the roles of Frank DiPascali and Annette Bongiorno. He also revisits the feeder funds and the question of whether their principals were victims or participants, and the repeated failures of the Securities and Exchange Commission examinations.
Behar is candid that Madoff lied to him, and he treats his subject's statements as evidence to be tested rather than accepted. The book benefits from arriving after the trustee's recoveries, the criminal trials of five Madoff employees, and the deaths of several principals, all of which produced documentation unavailable to earlier writers. It is long, and readers who want the basic narrative should start with Diana Henriques's The Wizard of Lies. Behar's contribution is on the questions the earlier books left open.
Key takeaways 7
- Behar argues the fraud began substantially earlier than the date Madoff admitted in his guilty plea.
- Madoff's account of acting alone was self-serving and is contradicted by the operational requirements of producing decades of fabricated statements.
- The seventeenth-floor operation required a staff who generated backdated trades matched to historical prices, which cannot be done unknowingly.
- Feeder fund principals earned fees that gave them reason not to investigate, and Behar examines which of them crossed from negligence into knowledge.
- Securities and Exchange Commission examiners repeatedly failed to perform the single check, confirming holdings with the depository, that would have ended the fraud.
- Madoff's legitimate market-making business was genuinely innovative, which is why his reputation withstood scrutiny for so long.
- Behar treats Madoff's own statements to him as evidence requiring corroboration rather than as disclosure.
Who should read it
Readers who already know the Madoff story and want the later evidence on when the fraud began and who else knew.
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Where it sits in the reference 4
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