He finds dark humor in Madoff’s widow, Ruth, whose level of complicity remains undetermined. Behar interviews the lawyer she is trying, so far in vain, to give back to her four-poster marital bed — “lower than a queen” — and quotes the tough FBI agent who berates her for smoking. “Ruth, that’s going to kill you,” he tells her. “I wish,” she replies.
“No wonder Bernie doesn’t care about jail,” the agent says later. “She doesn’t close the door.” [bleep] above.”
Perhaps most provocatively, Behar takes issue throughout the chapter with the characterization of Madoff’s eliminated clients as “victims,” preferring the term “losers.” After all, he writes, “these poor unfortunates had been making massive, impossibly consistent profits without even saying anything, often for decades.”
She is right that investors should do due diligence, but there is an odd, unacknowledged echo with one of Donald J. Trump’s favorite smears that makes Behar’s own late-in-the-narrative attempt to tie Madoff and the former president together as avatars of a national mental health crisis seem shallow.
In a large crowd that includes accountants, key piercers, secretaries, traders, traitors, quants, SEC officials, lawyers, judicial officials and dear Aunt Adele, who worked with neuroscientists and demands a forensic examination of Bernie’s deformed folds. Brain: The psychiatrist Behar consults seems like a last-minute and somewhat uncomfortable guest.
Yet for all its quirks and missteps, Madoff: The Final Word packs a story of mythic proportions into a bowl full of gold nuggets. If this is your first time being offered it, all the better.
MADOFF: The last word | By Richard Behar | Avid Readers Press | 384 pages | $35
