Why madoff confessed

But continued to spiral and you know the rest," Sorkin said. Madoff's son Andrew also speaks to Morley Safer in his first interview on the same broadcast. Please enter email address to continue. Please enter valid email address to continue. Chrome Safari Continue. Be the first to know. One possibility is that he bought the two canards floated by the media after almost every scandal. Those, according to Dezenhall, are:. Of course, both of those are nonsense. Confessions are a prelude to conviction, not vindication or forgiveness.

The idea that the cover up is worse than the crime is built on an illusion of visibility. Failed cover-ups may often make the initial crime worse. But the typical model should be built on the many sucessfull cover ups.

When cover ups work, you don't hear about the initial crime. So the real lesson is: if you are going to do a cover up, do it well.

Suddenly, Bennett was in danger of being added to the bucket of wealthy individuals and institutions the trustee was suing, claiming they knew or should have known their returns were fraudulent. And Picard did, with some help from federal prosecutors. These days, Bennett, 74, finds solace in the same home after a friend bought it and rented it back to him. Some victims contacted by The AP said that the news that Madoff had died at age 83 while serving a year prison term served only as a sad reminder of crimes that altered their lives.

In a panic, he briefly put his house up for sale and un-retired to earn money again as a commercial real estate development manager. Shapiro pounced on that opportunity, selling one of his Madoff funds for much less than it was worth, and another for closer to what Picard might eventually fetch, enabling him to save his home and start rebuilding his life. The International Olympic Committee. A country club in St. Paul, Minnesota. He also duped his family.

Ruth, Mark, and Andrew maintain that Bernie never told them the true nature of his business. When did it really begin? How much money was really involved? Madoff gave several different estimates, in the billions to tens of billions range. Who knew? Madoff took all of the blame himself, and only 15 of his employees were ever found guilty of a crime. The fact of it is, the Madoffs lived very well. They owned a penthouse apartment on the corner of East 64th Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, and owned a beach house in Montauk.

Bernie and Ruth co-owned two private jets with friends so they could trade off flying to these vacations spots. The six-figure membership fees allowed the Madoffs to make wealthy friends—you could call them potential investors—from all around the world. Bernie paid them at least six-figure salaries and provided them Platinum American Express cards that drew from the pot of investor money. The eventual bankruptcy suit laid bare their credit card bills, demonstrating, for example, that the brothers charged thousands of dollars on a family ski vacation in Jackson Hole in January In fact, that final year of the deceit, , brought lots of major expenditures.

Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers had already melted down by that point.