The Dolor Of Money
by Nancy Franklin March 23, 2009
Until last week, the world had not heard from Bernard Madoff since before his arrest, on December 11th, or seen much of him. The footage of the appearance he made the week after his arrest has been replayed on TV many times; he’s seen returning to his apartment, on East Sixty-fourth Street, after a trip to the federal courthouse, in lower Manhattan. He has on a black baseball cap and is wearing an enigmatic smile—a damnable smile, as it seemed to have meaning, and therefore put us in the decadent position of trying to figure out what that might be, when ultimately whatever it meant was beside the point. The facts of the case had more than enough meaning. Last week, Madoff made another trip to the courthouse, where his fate would be decided—or, rather, formalized, as he had already decided his own fate, by stealing billions of dollars from his investment clients. On Thursday, he pleaded guilty to the eleven felony counts against him, and Judge Denny Chin ruled that he be remanded. In other words, jail, not bail.
The proceeding was scheduled for 10 A.M., and anyone could attend. It was in many ways a normal day, albeit with a little more electricity in the air and more guards in the lobby. They were on high alert, but were also chatty; when a woman set off the metal detector, a guard told her to take off her shoes. “Shoe violation,” he said. “Shoe violation?” she said back. The guard then sang the words “shoe violation” to the melody of “She Works Hard for the Money.” The elevator going up to the twenty-fourth floor, where the hearing was held, was, as courthouse elevators usually are, redolent of breakfast pastries and the acrid smell of hot coffee meeting paper cup. But the courtroom was already full, and the overflow crowd had been sent down to a capacious jury room on the ground floor. The not very large screen that had been set up there and the blurry black-and-white picture on it were state-of-the-art for elementary schools in 1958, but they were sufficient to give good views of Madoff and his lawyer, Ira Lee Sorkin, and their team, sitting in a row at a long table.
Judge Chin went through a series of questions designed to establish definitively that Madoff knew what he was doing in pleading guilty, and Madoff answered succinctly: Yes. No. Yes, I am. Yes, I have. Yes, Your Honor. No, it has not. I do. The maximum penalties for the charges were read; the two exquisitely unnecessary penalties were as satisfying to hear as the ones that involved fines and prison terms: each charge carried “a maximum term of supervised release of three years” and “a mandatory special assessment of a hundred dollars.” Judge Chin, in a neutral tone, at last said, “Mr. Madoff, would you tell me what you did, please.” Madoff, also speaking in a neutral tone, read aloud from a prepared statement, whose words were purportedly his own, detailing his crimes, and how he achieved them and concealed them for so long. Yet in this very statement, designed to clear the air, was language that betrayed even more lies, deceit, and pathological self-righteousness. You should have been there.
Madoff’s opening lines were perhaps the richest, his second sentence alone speaking volumes: “I am actually grateful for this opportunity to publicly speak about my crimes, for which I am so deeply sorry and ashamed.” Listeners didn’t need to know that he was grateful, and we certainly didn’t need him to underscore his gratitude with the word “actually,” a semantic fillip that asked us to care how he felt about how he felt. As for his being “so” deeply sorry and ashamed, it’s possible that we might have believed him a little bit if he had left out that sweet-talking, disingenuous “so.” “Deeply sorry and ashamed”: he didn’t bother to separate “sorry” and “ashamed” into separate sentences and make them each stand alone and naked for a second, but delivered them as a singsong cliché.
Two sentences later, Madoff said, “When I began the Ponzi scheme, I believed it would end shortly and I would be able to extricate myself and my clients from the scheme.” As he read this, he betrayed no sense of how absurd it was to use the passive voice in regard to his scheme, as if it were a spell of bad weather that had descended on him. Still, he had faith—he “believed”!—that it would soon be over. Yes, “soon.” In most of the rest of the statement, one not only heard the aggrieved passive voice but felt the hand of a lawyer: “To the best of my recollection, my fraud began in the early nineteen-nineties.” One might have expected that the most dramatic moments would be Madoff’s pleading guilty, eleven times in a row, to the charges against him, or hearing his victims speak. Only four victims spoke, and fairly briefly. One of them had hoped for a trial so that “we have more of a chance to comprehend the global scope of this horrendous crime.” One wanted more “information as to where the money is and to find out who else may be involved in this crime.” Another—improperly—addressed Madoff himself, and wondered whether he’d turned around to look at his victims in the courtroom. But it was Sorkin who set the stage for the day’s biggest moment, with a sometimes grotesque spiel, in which he referred to “people who claim they lost money,” and at one point, after having just referred to Ruth Madoff’s “properties in Montauk, in New York, and Palm Beach,” started a sentence with the words “At his wife’s own expense.” No one knew how the sentence was going to go on from there, because Sorkin was halted by sounds from the courtroom—a burst of dark laughter in response to his special pleading, even though special pleading is his job. As soon as Sorkin finished asking that Madoff’s bail be continued, Chin said curtly, “I don’t need to hear from the government. It is my intention to remand Mr. Madoff.” Immediate applause, quickly tamped down by the Judge. Moments later, two court officers approached Madoff, who stood silently and still, and then he moved his arms a little so that his hands were behind his back. And then there was a click. ♦
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