Ruth Madoff alone in her Manhattan duplex penthouse on June 26, the day she struck a deal with prosecutors to keep $2.5 million. Six days later, on July 2, six U.S. marshals arrived to take possession of the apartment and usher Ruth out. Photograph by Stephen Wilkes.
On June 29, Bernard Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison for operating the largest Ponzi scheme in history, and for the first time since his arrest, seven months earlier, his wife, Ruth, issued a statement. “I am breaking my silence now, because my reluctance to speak has been interpreted as indifference or lack of sympathy for the victims of my husband Bernie’s crime, which is exactly the opposite of the truth,” it began. That day, nine of Bernie Madoff’s victims read statements of their own at his sentencing in court, telling horror stories of the overnight devastation he had brought on them, calling him the epitome of evil, and making references to the Devil, who chews up traitors in Dante’s Inferno: “May Satan grow a fourth mouth where Bernard L. Madoff deserves to spend the rest of eternity.” To compound the victims’ outrage, the news was just out that Ruth Madoff, who had been her husband’s closest companion and sometime bookkeeper through their 49 years of marriage, had cut a deal with prosecutors to keep $2.5 million in exchange for surrendering a potential claim to $80 million in assets, including her homes.
Madoff’s victims speak out. Above, Madoff investors Irwin and Steven Salbe in their Fort Lauderdale restaurant. Plus: Eleanor Squillari speaks to Mark Seal. Photograph by Stephen Wilkes.
So her statement of contrition could not have come at a worse time. Since the previous December, she had not shown the slightest sign of public remorse, and had routinely said that she had no comment whenever a reporter got near her. Now the 100-pound blonde who had come to embody all the ills of America’s latest age of greed—who had withdrawn $15.5 million from her account in the Madoff offices in the weeks before her husband confessed his Ponzi scheme, who, with Bernie’s brother, Peter, had posted her husband’s $10 million bond, and who had fought to keep her houses and property—was actually claiming to be a victim herself.
The outrage was universal.
“Hey Ruth, give up the $2.5 million for your husband[’s] thievery. And get your ass to work to pay all the restit[uti]on!” was just one of the vitriolic comments on the Los Angeles Times Web site. On the New York Times Web site, a reader wrote, “$2.5 million? I would leave her with $5,000 plus whatever Social Security she has coming. Would be good to see her begging with a cardboard sign on Wall Street.” Another took to verse: “Ms. Madoff will never let go / Of that 2.5 million or so, / And those bank accounts hidden / Will be at her biddin’ / That’s the way settlements go!”
Ruth Madoff said in her statement, “From the moment I learned from my husband that he had committed an enormous fraud, I have had two thoughts—first, that so many people who trusted him would be ruined financially and emotionally, and second, that my life with the man I have known for over 50 years was over.”
The comedian Andy Borowitz savagely parodied this on the Huffington Post: “Just hours after her husband Bernie Madoff was sentenced … Ruth Madoff expressed shock and dismay at her husband’s behavior, telling reporters, ‘This is not the man I owned nine homes with. When you spend hundreds of millions of dollars with someone, you think you know him.… I guess I was wrong.’” On the New York Times Web site, a furious observer said, “Wow, it was all his fault, you had nothing to do with it? Really? Is that the depth of your apology for the last 50 years of enjoying the plunder from charities and pensioners? Really? You would have done better to keep silent. This is repugnant.”
“The word ‘façade’ kept popping into my mind,” says Ronnie Sue Ambrosino, who lost $1.7 million to Madoff and whose husband read a statement in court. “This is somebody covering their own back! Let’s give her the benefit of the doubt; let’s say she knew nothing. On December 11, the day of Bernie’s arrest, she knew everything, and she had every opportunity to show the sorrow she spoke about in her statement, but she didn’t until it served her purpose. She continued to have arrogance for the victims and hide behind the façade of supposed sorrow, just as her husband had.”
In the course of writing three stories on the Madoff case for Vanity Fair, I’ve spoken to close to 100 people who knew Ruth, Bernie, and their family, and the majority believe that Ruth must have known about the scheme. Otherwise, if she was embarrassed, ashamed, betrayed, and confused, as she said in her statement, why did she stay with Bernie during his three months of house arrest—apparently at the cost of losing her sons, Mark and Andrew, who say they haven’t spoken to their mother since the still not fully explained day in their parents’ kitchen when Bernie confessed his crime to them with Ruth standing nearby? She’s still under scrutiny by investigators, as are her sons, Bernie’s brother, and Frank DiPascali Jr. and Annette Bongiorno, who directed Madoff’s investment-advisory business, on the 17th floor of the Lipstick Building, in Manhattan. One longtime observer of the Madoffs told me that Ruth’s statement, like everything preceding it in the case, may very well be just one more example of Bernie Madoff’s brilliance at deception and manipulation. He always ran the show, and probably still does, the observer believes. From the day he turned himself in and pleaded guilty, Madoff was determined to take the fall alone. He continues from behind bars to try to control every detail of his destiny, including, at least one person is willing to venture, Ruth’s statement.
“Like everyone else, I feel betrayed and confused,” Ruth wrote. “The man who committed this horrible fraud is not the man whom I have known for all these years.”
But the life she led with Bernie—and the one she continued to share with him from his arrest onward—tells a dramatically different story.
It pains me so much to remember my husband getting up in the middle of the night. He was a very fine physician. He would get up in the middle of the night year after year in all kinds of weather to go to the hospital to save someone’s life in rain, ice and snow. He would save someone’s life so that Bernie Madoff could buy his wife another Cartier watch. —Statement read in court by Maureen Ebel, Madoff victim.
‘I thought she was one of the Belle Harbor girls,” says Millie Tirado, who attended Far Rockaway High School with Ruth and Bernie, referring to the affluent Queens community that was home to “the golden girls, the girls with money, whose parents did not have to worry about sending them to college.” But Ruth was from Laurelton, a middle-class community in Queens, and her single-family house was already a major step up for her parents, Saul and Sara Alpern, who had moved there from an apartment building in Brooklyn. “Laurelton was Siberia, as far as we knew,” continues Tirado. Although “Ruthie,” as everyone called her, didn’t live in Belle Harbor, she strove to be the Belle Harbor type. “She was very well groomed, a real blonde, plus she didn’t look Jewish—she looked Waspy, Doris Day–ish.” A cheerleader as well as an honors student, Ruthie was voted “Josie College,” and everyone agreed that she was destined for big things.
Along came tough, cocky Bernie, who worked as a lifeguard and a part-time sprinkler-system installer, and who once said he didn’t like a book because it contained “hardly any pictures.” Ruth fell in love with him by 14. They were neighbors in Laurelton—she lived on 224th Street, he on 228th—and rode to school together every day. Whereas a childhood friend remembers Ruth’s parents as an intelligent, politically liberal couple who played bridge, read The New York Times, and summered in the Catskills, nobody remembers much about Bernie’s, except for the tsuris they got into with the S.E.C., in 1963, over the registration of a broker-dealer firm apparently run out of their home.
“Bernie being a lifeguard was a joke,” says Tirado. “I think he was really a cabana boy. In his off time, when he wasn’t tending to the cabanas, he had to watch the kiddie pool. I don’t have a recollection of him as an actual lifeguard. It was a very tough exam, and I don’t think he was a super athlete. He was always at the periphery with that trademark smirk. I pretty much had my pick of guys, and I wouldn’t put him out if he was on fire. There was something really creepy about him.”
Bernie’s best friend then, according to one classmate, thought Ruth at 15 was “an airhead.” Some, however, insist that she was the smarter of the two. They were married at the Laurelton Jewish Center on the weekend after Thanksgiving 1959, and from that day forward Ruth made her man her mission. “I don’t play the role of courtesan very well,” Carmen Dell’Orefice, the supermodel and longtime Madoff investor and friend, told me, referring to the type of woman who is always “deferring to a man’s wishes against her own.”
“Did Ruth?,” I asked her.
“To perfection!”
Subscribe to RSS headline updates from: Powered by FeedBurner
— THE VF BLOGS — VF DAILY CULTURE & CELEBRITY POLITICS & POWER SOCIETY & STYLE JAMES WOLCOTT’S BLOG & LITTLE GOLD MEN (Movies)
The Royal Watch
Ex-POTUS Watch
5 O’Clock Beat (Cocktails)
Gossip Pack
The One Percent (Jamie Johnson)
Stick Shift (The Gay Car Blog)
The Squash Blog
The Beauty Page
Parties
Hot List
The Kennedys
Brooke Astor
George W. Bush
Dominick Dunne
The Economy
Family Feuds
The Hamptons
Michael Jackson
The Kennedys
Literary Scandals
Bernard Madoff
Manhattan Real Estate
Oral Histories
Maureen Orth
Todd S. Purdum
Ronald Reagan
Michael Wolff
Turn the pages of Vanity Fair from January 1935.
Vanity Fair's Tales of Hollywood: Rebels, Reds, and Graduates and the Wild Stories Behind the Making of 13 Iconic Films
Vanity Fair: The Portraits: A Century of Iconic Images
Read Full Article »