More than money was lost. At least two people have committed suicide in despair over their losses. A major investor in Madoff has suffered a fatal heart attack after months of controversial litigation over his role in the scheme. Some investors have lost their homes. Others have lost the trust and friendship of family members and friends who accidentally hurt them.
Mr. Madoff was not spared in these tragic aftershocks. His older son, Mark, committed suicide in the early morning of December 11, 2010, the second anniversary of his father’s arrest, in his Manhattan apartment. He was characterized by his lawyer, Martin Flumenbaum, as “an innocent victim of his father’s monstrous crime who succumbed to two years of incessant pressure of false accusations and insinuations.” One of Mark Madoff’s last messages before his death was to Mr. Flumenbaum: ‘Nobody wants to believe the truth. Please take care of my family. ”
In June 2012, Bernard Madoff’s brother, Peter, a lawyer by training, pleaded guilty to charges of federal tax and security fraud related to his role as head of compliance with his older brother, but he is not accused of it. that he knowingly participated in the Ponzi. schedule. In December 2012, he forfeited all his personal property to the government to compensate his brother’s victims and was sentenced to ten years in prison. And on September 3, 2014, Mr. Madoff’s younger son, Andrew, died of cancer at the age of 48. He blamed the tension of the scandal for the return of the cancer he fought in 2003.
In addition to the human toll, professional reputation has been destroyed. More than a dozen prominent hedge funds and money managers, including J. Ezra Merkin and the Fairfield Greenwich Group, have had to admit that they gave their clients’ money to Mr. Madoff passed on and lost everything. Swiss private bankers, global commercial banks and major accountants have been dragged into court by clients who rely on them to monitor their Madoff investments.
The Securities Investor Protection Corporation, the industry-funded organization founded in 1970 to provide limited protection to brokers, spent more on the Madoff bankruptcy than on all of its earlier liquidations – and was fiercely attacked by victims who believe they wrongly denied is compensation.
And for the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has more than half a dozen credible tips about Mr. Madoff’s fraud scheme has been successfully investigated since at least 1992, it was the most humiliating failure in its 75-year history.