collapsed. desperate investors and their lawyers scrambled to madoff s east side offices friday looking for their money. they were turned away in the lobby. there has never been a ponzi scheme on the scale of madoff ever. we re talking thousands of people who thought that they had millions of dollars socked away for retirement, suddenly found out it was gone. rose and jack lass say they invested every penny of their savings with madoff. we started to sell our furniture, some of our things that we value, so that we should have some money immediately. then there s 91-year-old ian thiermann. he had to take a job at a grocery store after losing $700,000 to madoff. the human suffering that madoff caused, i don t think we can ever fully grasp. homes had to be sold, college educations truncated. people had to come out of retirement, go to work at whatever job they could get. and for those people, the madoff fraud is never going to be over. what may very well be the final steps o
Bernie Madoff stole my dad’s money – and his life
The most American of scandals surrounding the largest Ponzi scheme in history changed Willard Foxton s world forever
Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison
I heard about Bernie Madoff’s death this week the same way I heard about my father’s suicide – in both cases, my phone rang out of the blue in the middle of the workday, a relative told me the news and, all of a sudden, my world changed. Both times, it left me numb.
I’d always thought my father Bill – a bear of a man with a handlebar moustache and a row of gallantry medals earned on far flung fields from Belfast to Bosnia – was invincible. His friends told me that when he’d lost his arm in combat, his reaction had been to make a joke about losing his Rolex.