Madoff with the Money by Jerry Oppenheimer

Author:Jerry Oppenheimer
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Published: 2010-05-11T04:00:00+00:00

Amy also liked to tease Bernie if she had the opportunity.

He constantly needed to have a suntan, and if he ever pissed me off I would say, “Hey, Bernie, there’s a white spot on your left cheek.” And he’d go, “Where? Where?” And he’d ask for my compact and run into the men’s room to look. When he came out I’d say, “Gotcha!”

Bernie once seriously lectured Amy Joel about the dangers of entering her apartment wearing the shoes she wore on the streets of New York City, because of the dog and human urine and defecation she might have trod on. He figured she then probably took off her shoes and walked around barefoot in her apartment where she had just walked in her unsanitary shoes. Even worse, he guessed, she probably got into bed with bare feet that were sullied from what she had tracked in. The concept sickened him. “He was like over the top,” she recalls. “To stop him I said, ‘All right, all right, I’ll never do it again!’”

At one point during her two decades at Madoff she had worked in accounts payable. “Within three days of a bill coming in,” she says, “he made you pay it. If it had 30 days net or 60 days net, he’d say to pay it right away—whether it was a $42 Xerox bill, or a cell phone bill for ten grand, or a bill for rental of line feeds that was $500,000 a month.”

The reason? “He didn’t want any trouble with creditors.”

Every morning, the first thing he obsessively did was check his Dun & Bradstreet rating. Then he’d make his inspection rounds of the office to make certain everything was neat and orderly, that all desk items were in either black or gray, and if by chance he found someone using a desk calculator in another shade, even white, he’d toss it in the trash. He’d be spotted polishing the glass doors to the office, or on his hands and knees on the carpet in front of the elevator bank picking up litter, and making sure the carpet was perfectly straight.

Despite his OCD issues, Amy Joel thought of him as a “stand-up guy,” a “very generous” boss who helped his employees when they needed money or time off. “He was so honorable,” she believed for years before his thievery came to light and she and her family and her co-workers who had invested in Madoff were left with nothing.

In his early 70s Marty Joel died on May 6, 2003, of lung cancer, at his home in Palm Beach. The services were held at a funeral home in White Plains, New York, and Bernie was there with Ruth to eulogize his close friend and longtime associate. “He had the highest words of praise for him,” recalls Joel’s son-in-law, Howard Samuels, who was present.

Bernie gave the family the use of his private plane during that difficult time and helped make the funeral arrangements. “He couldn’t have been nicer,” says daughter Patty Samuels.

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