The Madoff Chronicles: Inside the Secret World of Bernie and Ruth Read Online Free PDF Page A

Manhattan and Mom stayed home. Life revolved around the children and school and temple, although neither Ruth nor Bernie was remembered as very religious. The Madoffs lived in a two-story brick house with a small backyard at 139–54 228th Street. Bernie was a member of Boy Scout Troop 225, which met at the Jewish Center in Laurelton. As a scout, Madoff would regularly raise his right hand and take the oath “to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.” He did manage to keep physically strong and mentally awake after he left the scouts, but not much else.
    Bernie’s parents, Sylvia and Ralph, had lived on Manhattan’s Lower East Side when he was born. After the birth of a second son, Peter, and then a daughter, Sondra, they sought the suburban dream and moved out to Laurelton. The Madoffs quickly made themselves at home in their new neighborhood.
    Bernie played on an intramural basketball team, where he was known for “stealing the ball,” said former classmate Michael Yessner. “No one could steal the ball like Bernie.”
    Ruth was considered very bright—much smarter than Bernie, who was, at best, a B+ student. “Definitely above average, but not of the genius caliber,” said Portnoy of Madoff. But Bernie was remembered as being cagey in school, able to use a glib tongue to get ahead.
    “He hadn’t read a book and he was called on in English class to give a book report,” remembers Portnoy from their sophomore year. “So Bernie got up there and just made it up while he went along. After Bernie’s presentation, the teacher looked a little suspicious. She asked Bernie to show the class the book, but Bernie said he had already returned it to the public library.”
    Madoff would be just as good at fudging fifty years later, in 2006, when the SEC began to investigate allegations he was running a Ponzi scheme. He talked his way out of trouble by creating a fictional set of books for the investigators, making it all up just as he had in his sophomore English class. Even though the investigators knew Madoff had somehow “mislead” (sic) them, they eventually closed the case, reporting they could not find “evidence of fraud.” His high school English teacher had done no better at exposing Bernie’s classroom scam.
    Bernie went off to college at the University of Alabama in the fall of 1956. One of Bernie’s friends said he claimed he had won a swimming scholarship at Alabama; however, school records show Alabama did not have a varsity swimming team until several years later and that there were “no swimming scholarships” at the time. While he was away at college, Ruth, still a junior in high school, remained loyal and wrote him long love letters.
    He wasn’t in Tuscaloosa long. He made an effort to fit in there by joining Sigma Alpha Mu, founded as “a fraternity of Jewish men,” but Alabama was an unlikely college choice for a city kid from New York. In the same year Madoff was there, the school’s first African-American student was accepted and then expelled three days later “for her own safety” after a student mob threatened violence.
    After only three months in Alabama, Madoff returned to New York and was back in the arms of Ruth. He enrolled at Hofstra College in January 1957, and other than a few months in training at Fort Bragg during his three years of service as a second lieutenant in the Army Reserves, Bernie and Ruth would be together, almost every day, for five decades, until he was put behind bars on March 12, 2009.
    She still found him sexy at age seventy.
    Despite the false start in Alabama, Madoff moved through Hofstra without a hitch, graduating in 1960 with a B.A. in Political Science. Madoff commuted from his home, about ten miles away, and he’s not remembered as having had much of a presence on campus. There’s no mention or photo of him in his graduating class yearbook. Years later, in 2004, Madoff’s presumed