The Wizard of Lies by Diana B. Henriques

Author:Diana B. Henriques
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2014-05-18T16:17:55+00:00

12

RECKONING THE DAMAGE

As with every event of personal devastation, they remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they learned that they were ruined.

Tim Murray, a property manager in Minnesota, whose family had first invested with Madoff through Mike Engler, was traveling and nearly drove off the road when he heard the news of Madoff’s arrest. At first he thought it was just another of the jealous rumors that regularly surfaced about Madoff—always investigated, always disproved. Given Madoff’s stature on Wall Street, he said, “I am supposed to believe that one day he gets up in the morning and does something to get arrested for? Not likely.” But Madoff had been arrested, and all the money that Murray and his family had entrusted to him was gone.

Another second-generation investor was having her hair cut when her sister called with the news that “everything had vaporized.” The realization that her elderly parents had lost everything “came quickly and hit hard. We were so worried.”

The gray-white paper rolled out of Mary Thomajan’s fax machine the day after she had returned from a soul-searching journey to India. She expected it to be the account statement that would confirm she had the money to build the dream life she’d planned to create in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The fax was from the small feeder fund she had trusted for eighteen years, telling her that all her money had been invested with Madoff, who had been arrested. “In the 50 seconds it took to read that fax, I went from being a multimillionaire to having my life savings wiped out and life as I knew it forever altered.”

Ellen Bernfeld, a singer and songwriter with dreams of being an author, was having lunch with friends when she got the “life-shattering phone call that changed my world.” She reflected sadly, “My father was not around to see this terrible disaster and to feel its aftermath, but my mother is, and she is a child of the Great Depression, so this is her worst nightmare.”

Robert Halio’s son called him at his retirement home in Boca Raton with the news. “I almost fell to the floor,” he remembered. “I couldn’t catch my breath and thought I might be having a heart attack. I was in total shock.” A lifetime’s savings, the cashed-out value of insurance policies—95 percent of his and his wife’s modest wealth—had been entrusted to Madoff and was gone. His wife, Stephanie, was just entering a nearby movie theater with a friend, also a Madoff investor, when the friend got a call with the same dread news. Robert’s call to her came a moment later. “I was hoping that it was all a terrible mistake,” she recalled.

One investor was with her husband at her orthopedist’s office in New York City, getting a cortisone shot for her sore hip. As she was pulling up her jeans, her husband got the news on his cell phone. He was devastated, almost hysterical. She had to help him to the car and make the drive to their home in suburban New Jersey.

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