![]() SHARON LISSAUER: I put all my savings in stupidly and because I trusted him so much. And victims such as the late Sharon Lissauer thought the Madoffs must have squirreled away money somewhere. The idea that so much paper wealth could suddenly be vaporized seemed absurd. They'd put money in firms that had invested with Bernie. But lots of people who never heard of Madoff discovered they were victims, too. Many of the victims were Madoff's friends and relatives in the Jewish community, and they felt deeply betrayed. Famous people such as Kevin Bacon and Elie Wiesel lost money. ZARROLI: Almost overnight, thousands of investors were wiped out - college endowment funds, municipal governments, charities. ![]() UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) What are you talking about? Of course, there are investments.ĭE NIRO: (As Bernie Madoff) I made them up - basically just a big Ponzi scheme. ROBERT DE NIRO: (As Bernie Madoff) It's a fraud. (SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE WIZARD OF LIES") The moment was dramatized in the HBO movie "The Wizard Of Lies," in which Madoff was played by Robert De Niro. Faced with ruin, Madoff confessed to the FBI. Then came the 2008 financial crisis, when too many people wanted their money at once. The reality is what people were looking at when they got their account statements every month was a fiction. None of it got invested or a very, very small amount of it got invested. RON STEIN: Madoff was taking that money and basically using it as a checking account. Ron Stein ran a nonprofit group that represented Madoff victims. He was running a classic Ponzi scheme, paying off old investors with money from new ones. As it turned out, Madoff was violating the rules on an epic scale. ZARROLI: And Madoff was very rich with a yacht and fancy houses in Palm Beach, France and the Hamptons. And if you could, then you were so grateful to him that you didn't ask a lot of questions. Diana Henriques wrote a book about the Madoff case.ĭIANA HENRIQUES: He lets a sort of velvet rope syndrome develop, that it was very hard to get into the funds, very hard to get Bernie to manage your money. No one understood how he did it, but everyone wanted in. It boasted impressive returns in good times and bad. And from a swank Manhattan office building, he ran an investment fund said to be worth $50 billion. He had chaired the Nasdaq stock exchange. ZARROLI: The public didn't yet know Madoff's name, but Wall Street sure did. UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: A fixture on Wall Street, Bernie Madoff, 70 years old, arrested by the FBI. ![]() JIM ZARROLI, BYLINE: It was December 2008, the height of the financial crisis, when the unbelievable news came out. NPR's Jim Zarroli looks back at Madoff's life. Madoff was a legendary figure on Wall Street who robbed thousands of investors of their savings. Bernie Madoff, who carried out one of the most notorious Ponzi schemes in history, died on Wednesday while serving a prison sentence in North Carolina.
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