Add Steven Speilberg, John Malkovich and Mets owner, Fred Wilpon to the list of thousands of people or groups who were victimized by Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. (s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/st_madoff_victims) The list is international in scope and public knowledge of the victims is added to daily as people join in on lawsuits trying to recover lost funds. The prurient details of actual amounts of money lost isn’t always available, but probably no one’s losses will exceed the seven billion dollars of the Fairfield Greenwich Advisors group who lost half of their fourteen billion dollars in assets.
More names will undoubtedly be added to the list as individuals and corporations seek to recover lost funds. Many of the more public names will find there way to Entertainment Tonight, but I think I think Phyllis Molchatsky’s reaction to her losses was the most interesting of any I’ve read about. She is suing the SEC alleging negligence in their failure to detect Madoff’s scam.
As I mentioned recently, even if Madoff bought estates or artwork every day for the past ten years, those real assets are around somewhere. Finding those assets may be the new century’s version of searching for sunken pirate treasure depending on how shrewd Madoff was in hiding his ill-gotten gains. I haven’t read anywhere whether or not he plans to cooperate with authorities in locating the lost empire’s wealth. But this story is just beginning.
During the last century, film director Alfred Hitchcock was a guest on the Johnny Carson version of The Tonight Show. Johnny asked the reigning king of crime and horror movies whether he thought that anyone ever committed the perfect crime. Hitchcock’s response, in his unique breathless delivery, was that he was certain that perfect crimes were committed every day. They were never uncovered, never even recognized as crimes. That’s what made them perfect.
Which of course makes me wonder, has there ever been a perfect Ponzi scheme? Has anyone ever bilked billions or even millions from investors, and then slowly and systematically lost money so that those investors never even knew they were never actually invested in anything? Probably not, at least not with that amount of money. But I wonder on a small scale if little Ponzi schemes aren’t taking place every day, never to be discovered. It’s only a perfect crime if you don’t get caught.
By Myron Gushlak
