Madoff
The Final Word
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- 16,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
Renowned investigative journalist Richard Behar delivers the definitive account of history’s largest—and longest-running—financial fraud, “the scale of the deception…beggars belief” (New York Post).
Some $68 billion evaporated during Bernie Madoff’s epic confidence game. Two people were driven to suicide in the wake of the Ponzi Scheme’s exposure. Others went to prison. But there has never been a satisfying accounting for how Bernie got away with so much, for so long. Until now.
Richard Behar’s relationship with Madoff began in 2011 with a simple email request from the conman. By the time Madoff died in 2021, he had sent Behar more than 300 emails and dozens of handwritten letters, participated in some fifty phone conversations, and sat for three in-person jailhouse interviews—a level of access provided to no other reporter. Behar also established relationships with hundreds of regulators, prosecutors, FBI agents, investors, Wall Street experts, ex-employees of Madoff’s, family members, school classmates, and others.
The result is the final word on the criminal behind history’s most enduring fraud—and on those who believed him, covered for him, or locked him up. Behar illuminates not only the fraud’s origins—decades earlier than Madoff claimed in his confession—but also the complicity of investors, Wall Street insiders, family members, and some of the largest banks in the US and Europe.
Shocking, infuriating, riveting (and at times absurdly funny), Madoff shows us how Bernie ensnared thousands of investors. As Behar’s dogged reporting over the last fifteen years makes clear, however, there aren’t many innocents left standing by the end of this tale. Just about everyone involved is guilty, at a minimum, of humanity’s most consistent weakness: greed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bernie Madoff was merely the rotten centerpiece of a wider web of scammers, according to this savvy debut. Forbes editor Behar investigates the decades-long Ponzi scheme run by Madoff's fraudulent hedge fund and its 2008 collapse, which wiped out some $20 billion in investors' principal and the life savings of many retirees. Behar skillfully elucidates Madoff's scheme, which took in investors' money, parked it in a JPMorganChase checking account instead of investing it, and paid stellar returns to old investors out of money from new ones; a sizable staff and intense labor were required to buttress the fraud with faked records of stock trades. Centering the book on his decade's worth of interviews with Madoff after his conviction, Behar depicts his subject as a compulsive grifter who dodged questions with muddled bloviating, yet still possessed a manipulative charisma. But in Behar's telling, Madoff was merely the apex predator in an ecosystem of flimflam, which included employees and relatives who helped cook the books; major investors who knew Madoff's operation was a Ponzi scheme, but made huge profits by recruiting other marks into it; and JPMorganChase, which turned a blind eye to evidence of the scam. Behar's entertaining account shows how easily a sociopathic liar will be enabled by a greedy system.
