For Ruth Madoff, misery marked 2010. On December 11, the second anniversary of the arrest of her husband, their elder son Mark hanged himself, leaving behind a wife, an ex-wife and two children by each woman. Her other son, Andrew, 44, hasn't talked to her at all in the last two years.
Ruth, according to several news reports, was spending a fair amount of time in Florida staying with her brother-in-law Peter Madoff in Palm Beach or with her sister Joan Roman and husband Robert in Boca Raton. Ruth was spotted driving a 14-year-old Infiniti, which she uses to deliver hot meals to homebound elderly people.
In 2010, federal marshals auctioned what was left of the couple's worldly possessions, including Bernie's underwear, after earlier sales of the couple's New York City penthouse, Montauk beachfront home, Palm Beach estate and French condo. As part of a deal that kept her out of jail, Ruth surrendered more than $45 million and was allowed to keep $2.5 million, an amount that still angered Madoff victims, but after legal expenses, left her with practically nothing.
Once a Girl Scout Brownie and a Fordham Law grad, Bernie Madoff's 40-year-old niece has the lowest public profile of the immediate family members. Still, she remains exposed to possible criminal charges, since she collected millions from the family businesses, partly owned by her father, Peter.
As a senior compliance officer at Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, she signed numerous documents assuring the SEC and other regulators that the firm was on the up-and-up. A civil complaint filed by Irving Picard, the Madoff bankruptcy trustee, against her, her father, Andrew and Mark Madoff and the Madoff family grandchildren seeks to recover $200 million they collected from the criminal enterprise. Shana and her cousins also used millions to fund family investments in biotech and alternate energy companies. Her only lucky note: The SEC determined that her romance and subsequent marriage to former SEC enforcement lawyer Eric Swanson had nothing to do with the agency's missing the Madoff scam.
Hooper was selling fancy fly-fishing gear at Urban Angler in New York when she landed Andrew Madoff, a world traveler, fishing aficionado and millionaire son of Wall Street legend Bernard Madoff. Engaged to Andrew shortly before the scandal broke in 2008, Hooper is fast becoming the public face of the younger Madoff generation as it continues to assert "nobody but Bernie knew nuth-in."
Following the December 11th suicide of Andrew Madoff's older brother Mark, Hooper gave a softball interview to The Wall Street Journal that was instantly criticized by the Columbia Journalism Review. Referring to how she and Andrew were dealing with the public perception of the Madoff scandal, she told the Journal: "When all of this happened, we decided that we weren't going to sit around all of the time with our laptops on our laps reading blogs…. We were not going to sit around talking about how horrible this is."
Now comfortable in a $4.4 million New York City apartment and running an emergency-planning business called Black Umbrella, Hooper, 38, can look forward to a year when bankruptcy trustee Irving Picard tries to take everything away from Andrew, and Andrew keeps looking over his shoulder to see if the criminal prosecutors remain in hot pursuit. And then, there is the matter of marrying Andrew. Right now, his divorce from his wife Deborah, the mother of his two children, is on hold due to all the litigation engulfing the Madoffs.
Even before her 46-year-old husband Mark hanged himself with a dog leash while his 2-year-old son Nicholas slept in a nearby bedroom, Stephanie was having difficulty coping with the enormity of being part of a family linked to the biggest Ponzi scheme in history.
Vacationing at Disney World in Florida with her 4-year-old daughter Audrey, Stephanie began receiving desperate emails from her husband. Alarmed, she called her stepfather Martin London, who discovered Mark dead in the couple's Soho apartment and called police. In a statement, she said she loved Mark "forever," adding: "I am devastated and now raising two small children alone." Earlier in the year, she had petitioned a judge to change her last name and the children's from Madoff to Morgan. In effect, she inherits the lawsuit by the Madoff bankruptcy trustee who is seeking to recover millions from her late husband's estate and his children's trusts.
Until bankruptcy trustee Irving Picard unleashed a $19.6 billion lawsuit in December against Sonja Kohn, she was unknown to most Americans. At best, in European, Russian and Israeli circles, she was seen as a reclusive Austrian financial wizard whose Vienna-based Bank Medici ran hedge funds offering investors access to Bernard Madoff.
The 62-year-old Kohn worked as a retail broker at Merrill Lynch and she and her husband Erwin lived in Monsey, New York. After meeting Madoff in the mid-1990s, she operated from her Eurovaleur fund's office in the General Motors Building in Manhattan. The bankruptcy trustee now regards Kohn as Bernie's No. 1 accomplice and says she raised $9.1 billion for the Ponzi king. Picard accuses Kohn and her husband of continuing to hide hundreds of millions of dollars for themselves. Through the detailed filings against her, the bankruptcy trustee hopes to prod prosecutors around the world to pursue criminal charges against her.
Connecticut-based Sandra Manzke ran two hedge funds—MAXAM Capital Management and one she sold to Mass Mutual, Tremont Capital Management—that specialized in investing in Bernard Madoff. Those investors lost more than $3 billion. She also was a director of Kingate Global Fund, a British Virgin Island firm that may have lost another $3 billion with Madoff. Not surprisingly, neither investigators nor investors believe Manzke, now 62, was the victim she portrayed herself to be in an interview she gave in early 2009 to Frontline's Martin Smith. Even better, just three weeks before Madoff was caught, the New York Post and Bloomberg News reported Manzke sent a letter to 500 wealthy investors urging the foundation of an investors' protection group she called: "Hedge Fund Investors United Forum." Manzke and her companies are being sued by Madoff bankruptcy trustee Irving Picard.
The only Madoff-affiliated woman currently in jail, Bongiorno faces 75 years in prison as a key accomplice in the Madoff Ponzi scheme. Now 62, she was hired 42 years ago out of a Queens, New York, high school to be Bernie Madoff's secretary—and made more than $14 million as his trusted assistant, collecting stock quotes and other data used to fabricate thousands of fake trading documents and statements sent to Madoff investors.
By 1995, she had partially retired with her husband Rudy to Boca Raton, Florida, where they lived in a $1.5 million country club estate home when not at home in their $2.6 million Manhasset, Long Island, mansion. They drove his-and-her Mercedes when not cruising around in her Bentley.
Either unable or unwilling to post $5 million bail, Bongiorno now is being held by the U.S. Marshals Service in Florida pending an appeal that may not be heard until mid-January at the earliest.
Joann "Jodi" Crupi was a protégée of Annette Bongiorno at Madoff's shop and eventually took over the duty of handling the firm's daily money transfers with banks and customers. She also managed customer accounts worth $900 million, prosecutors say. Now 49, Crupi went to work for Madoff in 1983 as a keypunch operator. She was charged in the same indictment as Bongiorno and three other male Madoff employees and faces 65 years in prison. The government alleges that in 2008 alone Crupi got more than $2.7 million from Madoff. She is free on $5 million bail, wearing an electronic monitoring bracelet and living near her New Jersey home. The government has filed a forfeiture action against another property, a $2.2 million waterfront home in Mantoloking, New Jersey, that Crupi has tried to assign ownership of to her partner, Judith Bowen.
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Sheryl Weinstein was a certified public accountant and chief financial officer for Hadassah, a Jewish women's charity that invested with Madoff, when she met Bernie and became his mistress. She even got her son a job as an intern at Madoff's firm. Most important, Weinstein, a Wharton graduate, managed to lose all her money investing with him, as well as money that belonged to her husband Ronald and his relatives. To get revenge for the affair, and try to recoup some of the losses, Weinstein wrote Madoff's Other Secret: Love, Money, Bernie, and Me for St. Martin's Press. The big news in her book: Bernie was not big in the penis department. Weinstein and her husband say they were forced to sell their East 72nd Street apartment. Ronald Weinstein tells The Daily Beast that the couple remains together: "We are moving on with our lives," he says.
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Assistant U.S. Attorney Lisa Baroni, a graduate of Barnard College and Columbia University Law School, now is the senior prosecutor in the courtroom handling the Madoff case, with five of his associates now facing trial and several others co-operating with prosecutors. Her former partner, Marc Litt, has left to join Baker & Hostetler, the firm where bankruptcy trustee Irving Picard is overseeing the recovery actions against Madoff scheme participants around the world. So it will be up to Baroni—in consultation with U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara—to decide whether to prosecute Madoff's brother Peter, son Andrew, and niece Shana.
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In what almost certainly is the most expensive reputation-rehabilitation exercise on record, Barbara Picower agreed to surrender $7.2 billion from her husband Jeffry Picower's estate to the bankruptcy trustee and the Justice Department for redistribution to Madoff victims.
Mrs. Picower, well known in New York and Palm Beach for her charitable work and large donations on behalf of the Picower Foundation, had always portrayed herself and her husband as victims of Madoff. But had he not died of a heart attack in the swimming pool of the couple's Palm Beach mansion in 2009, Jeffry Picower might well have faced criminal charges since he alone got $5 billion more out of Madoff than he put in.
Now, with Picower leaving at least $200 million more to his widow beyond the settlement, she can continue to say his name remains unsullied. And institutions, such as MIT, which were still in line to have Picower pledges of millions fulfilled, can now accept the donations more comfortably.
