A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff (2021) Movie Script
1
[soft music]
Bring me
Bring me
I will fill it
Where it comes from
I can't tell you
Bring me
Your empty jar
I will fill it
I will fill it
Where it comes from
Where it goes
I can't tell you
No one knows
[Alicia narrating]
2008 was a weird year.
Facebook had just hit
100 million users,
the stock market was
at an all-time high,
the sort of high
that comes before a crash,
and I was an artist working
in an office on Wall Street.
It wasn't a normal office.
It was an entire empty floor
that this nonprofit
had convinced the landlord
to give
to a bunch of artists
for free for a year.
[elevator dings]
And that's
where my story begins.
-Hey.
-[Man] Hi.
[Alicia narrating]
Have you ever been
in a completely empty floor
of an office building?
The names of cities
still on the wall,
a blank space above them
where clocks once hung,
a vast sea of cubicles
which once held workers
who spent
their waking lives here.
Floors marked
with scuffs from shoes
that walked back and forth,
and back and forth.
There's something
post-apocalyptic about it.
It's like walking
through the ruins
of a once-great civilization.
[tuning violin]
I had been applying to artists'
residencies for a long time
before finally getting
this one.
A year of free space
in Manhattan was a big deal,
and I wanted
to make the most of it.
I loved my day job
teaching bat mitzvah girls
how to chant from the Torah,
but I thought maybe
this would be the year
I would finally break through
as an artist.
The problem was I hadn't
made anything for months.
I secretly hoped
this new office
might give me new courage.
Maybe I'd create some big,
ambitious performance here.
Maybe it would even
be marketable.
But as the Yiddish saying goes,
man plans and God laughs.
[cars honking]
The Financial District,
like the rest of New York City,
is an improbable combination.
Gleaming and grimy,
fancy and cheap, everything
butted up against each other,
jostling for a space.
Each day, I'd ride my bike
in from Brooklyn
over the Williamsburg Bridge,
down through
the Lower East Side,
past the tenement buildings
where my great-grandparents
once lived.
[elevator beeping]
[elevator dings]
[soft string music]
Then one day I saw a man in
the office across the street.
He put his head
down on his desk
and left it there
for a long time.
[Woman on radio]
We begin with Wall Street,
and the news today isn't
getting any better.
[loud voices of traders
on radio]
[Man #1 on radio]
There's just panic in the air.
[Man #2] Wall Street treated
the American economy
like a casino.
[Man #3]
Not in generations
has Wall Street absorbed
the number of body blows
it took today.
[Man #4]
The American financial system
is rocked to its foundation
as top Wall Street
institutions topple
under a mountain of debt.
[Man #5]
It is definitely
a very, very difficult time,
and it's not gonna
get better quickly.
[Alicia narrating]
And then Bernie Madoff
turned himself in.
His 40-year hedge fund was
actually a giant Ponzi scheme,
the largest financial crime
in history.
[Woman #1 on radio]
Until this week,
Bernie Madoff
was a lion of Wall Street.
He managed one of the most
successful hedge funds,
then FBI agents...
[Woman #2]
"$50 billion Ponzi scheme..."
[Woman #3] One of the biggest
Ponzi schemes ever
is reverberating throughout
the world today...
[Man #6]
...The NASDAQ stock market.
Many people
are starting to believe
it may have been
from the very beginning.
[Woman #4] How could
he pull this off by himself?
[Man #6]
It seems almost impossible.
[Woman #5]
All fake, all fake. A novel.
[Interviewer on radio]
Your statement's a novel?
[Woman #5]
Yes, unfortunately.
[sighs]
Oh, my God.
He looks like my dad.
He has kind eyes.
[sighs]
[Alicia narrating]
And that was the beginning
of my obsession
with Bernie Madoff.
We were a community of artists
on the ninth floor
with ink on our fingers
and paint on our faces.
We each had our projects,
our insecurities,
our secret fears.
As for me,
I couldn't stop talking
about the giant fraud that
happened right down the street.
-[Patricia] Hey.
-Hey.
Nice Christmas lights.
Thanks.
[Patricia]
What's he doing on your wall?
The whole thing is crazy.
He grew up in Long Island
without much money,
he got mediocre grades,
he married his high school
sweetheart Ruth.
He's like a totally normal guy.
He started his financial
business with money
he saved up lifeguarding and
installing sprinkler systems.
[Patricia]
Huh.
[Alicia]
Doesn't make sense.
He never studied
economics or finance,
but his company helped invent
the computer trading system
that modernized
the stock market.
And even when he got
rich, he didn't flaunt it,
not by the standards
of Wall Street.
He was more
like some friendly uncle
people trusted
with their money.
-Hm.
-He was this big philanthropist,
but all the money he gave
away was stolen money.
He made this whole thing up
from scratch,
and he brought his two sons
into the office to work for him.
Wow.
-[people chattering]
-[upbeat indie rock music]
[Alicia narrating]
As fall turned to winter,
I'm sure my growing obsession
made me pretty annoying
to my fellow artists,
but by the time of our January
artists' salon,
Bernie Madoff was starting
to work his way
into other people's lives, too.
Is he a sociopath
or just a common criminal?
I know. And get this.
I just found out
my best friend's grandfather
put him through college
with the money
-he earned from Madoff.
-What?
My boyfriend's uncle's
a lawyer,
and he's representing
three of the victims.
[gasps]
Holy shit.
I'm one degree
from Bernie Madoff.
[phone ringing]
-Hey, Mom.
-Hey, honey.
Remember my college roommate
Evelyn?
She works in finance,
and boy does she have
a Madoff story for you!
[Alicia narrating]
I met with Evelyn
in her office
just a few blocks from mine.
As she spoke, her words
began to form themselves
into a song in my head.
This was the first time,
but it wouldn't be the last.
[minimal electric guitar music]
My name is Evelyn
I was the credit risk
officer at a major bank
Which shall go unnamed
My job was to approve any
funds the bank would use
Due diligence
One day they asked me
To approve
Bernard Madoff Securities
So I tried to do
An analysis
Due diligence
But I couldn't get
any information
Everyone said Bernie Madoff
Was the president
of NASDAQ
Bernie's been in business
for 40 years
How dare you ask
Now this was a red flag.
Why no information?
So I went to speak
with a colleague,
a very knowledgeable person
who doesn't
take things at face value.
I said I'm being asked
to approve Bernie Madoff.
"What do you think?"
And she said, "Evelyn, I've been
watching Madoff for years."
Something's wrong there.
I don't know what.
It could be insider trading,
it could be fake returns.
I don't know, but I wouldn't
touch him with a 10 foot pole.
So down the hall,
I went to tell them
I cannot approve
this investment
Despite
its stellar returns
I find no proof
these returns are legal
Nor evidence
of a trading strategy
On the part
of Madoff Securities
Well, they were furious
with me
I later found out
they had wanted to fire me
I did leave that bank
eventually
But that's normal
in the industry
Three years later,
the scandal broke,
and the next morning
I received a call at home.
It was an apology
from one of my old bosses.
Now, this might not
sound like much to you.
but you have to understand
this industry is--
you don't look back.
No one admits mistakes.
You just move forward.
It attracts alpha personalities.
There's no culture
of apology
So for that man to call me
and say what he said
was like anyone else
sending a huge bouquet.
-Just a room
Full of flowers
-[soft music]
[soft music]
Blossoms come about
because a series
of conditions
lead up to their blooming.
Leaves are blown away
because a series of conditions
lead up to their falling.
Due diligence.
Everything is created
by a series
of causes and conditions.
-[soft music]
-[leaves rustling]
[Alicia narrating]
News of Madoff's crimes
continued to unfold.
Stories came in
from all over the country
and they started
to draw me into these
weird little worlds
like Palm Beach, Florida,
one of the hardest hit places
where a lot of people
lost a lot of money.
[phone ringing]
Hello.
Hi. This is Alicia.
You said you'd be willing
to talk to me?
It's that girl.
Country clubs here
didn't allow Jews in until 1965.
So we made our own country club.
The Madoffs had
a house here in Palm Beach,
and they belonged
to that Jewish country club.
People would join just
to get close to Bernie
to get a chance to
possibly invest with him.
Mm-hmm.
My best friend lost everything.
What do you think the rabbi
did at services that week?
I don't know.
-I never go.
-Me, neither.
Actually, I have this friend.
She plays accordion.
Her mom lives down in West
Palm Beach across the tracks,
and she told me
the congregation recited
the Kaddish for Bernie Madoff.
[Woman]
Maybe they should.
Mm-hmm.
The ladies got me wondering,
should we all be saying
a Kaddish for Bernie Madoff?
If you don't know
the Kaddish prayer,
this might not sound
like such a crazy idea.
But here's the thing.
The Kaddish is one of the
holiest Jewish prayers.
We use it
as a prayer for the dead,
although there's no mention
of death in it at all.
The words are in ancient Aramaic
and they're
all about praising God--
May God be glorified
and exalted
and raised up and blessed.
According to tradition,
saying this prayer helps
a dead person's soul
ascend to heaven.
You don't say a Kaddish
for someone who's alive,
except in one
extremely rare case:
excommunication.
[women gasp]
If you were
to excommunicate someone
you'd observe
all the mourning rituals
as if they had actually died,
but that's a rare
and ancient practice,
and it's not the sort of thing
you expect to find
in Palm Beach.
And yet it did seem
like something ancient
was happening here,
something of our time,
but also beyond it.
So I started looking
for old ideas
about possessions and loss
and what really matters,
ideas from before
Bernie Madoff,
before Wall Street,
before America,
and I started turning them
into songs.
[soft violin music]
Blossoms come about
because a series of conditions
lead up to their blooming.
Blossoms do not appear
independently,
nor does a leaf fall of itself
out of its season,
so everything has its coming
forth and passing away.
Nothing can be independent
without any change.
It is the everlasting
And unchanging rule
Of this world
That everything is created
By a series of causes
and conditions
By a series
of causes and conditions
And everything disappears
By the same rule
Everything changes
Nothing remains constant
90 years after
my great-grandparents came
to America
from Eastern Europe,
my family was still Jewish
but not really religious
at all,
and we were the only Jewish
family in our neighborhood,
so I didn't know much
about my culture
until I turned 20
and got curious.
Now, being Jewish was
a big part of my identity,
and usually that made me proud.
But when I thought about
Bernie Madoff, I felt shame.
What did it mean
that he was from my tribe,
that he literally shared
my DNA?
And what about Wall Street?
Shouldn't they have known
something was wrong?
Was he that much of a genius,
or did they look the other way?
I had to understand more.
Conveniently,
a whole mini industry
of Madoff books
had just begun to emerge.
They always had
like The Magician of Lies:
How Bernie Madoff Killed Trust
or The Madoff Secret: Behind
Closed Doors on the 17th Floor.
My favorite was a best seller
by the Madoff whistleblower.
It was called
I Tried to Tell Them:
a True Crime In Modern Finance.
[upbeat music]
The author was a quant,
a math genius
working on Wall Street,
using equations
to make money for his firm.
He wrote...
[Man] I kept getting
in trouble with my bosses
because I couldn't match
Madoff's returns.
Then I started looking
into how he did it.
It didn't take long to realize
the whole thing
had to be a fraud.
Listen, back in 2005,
I handed the government
a detailed report entitled
"The World's Largest
Hedge Fund Is a Fraud."
The government ignored me.
[tense music]
There is no such thing
as a straight line
No such, no such
thing as a straight line
In finance
I knew as soon as I saw it
Yes,
I knew as soon as I saw it
I'm a quant
I understand these things
in a way most people can't
Futures contracts,
split strike conversions
I'm a quant, I can do
the math most people can't
I can
Mortgage backed,
asset backed
Collar trades,
mean reversions
Numbers exist
in relationship
That's how I knew I saw
a straight line
45 degree angle
Does not happen in finance
No matter how lucky
or smart you are
No matter
your secret strategy
Unless your secret
strategy is that
You're drawing the line
[gasps]
[metronome ticking]
I knew
I had to say something
But I also knew
these people were dangerous
The Russian mafia
might have been involved
So before I compile
my report
For the safety of myself
and my family
I had to buy a gun
[metronome ticking]
[upbeat music]
And in this new book
I've been reading,
it says Bernie loved straight
lines and right angles
and had, like,
almost a phobia of circles.
This one time he arrived
at his London office
to find they had installed
a video conferencing center
with a curved wall,
and he flew into a rage
and demanded they tear it down,
like, "I can't live with it.
It has to be square!"
[upbeat music]
[toilet flushes]
But he rented three floors
of the Lipstick Building,
which is an oval.
I guess the 18th and 19th floors
were a legitimate
trading business
he ran with his two sons.
Meanwhile, on the 17th floor,
they were, like,
making up numbers
and doing all the Ponzi stuff.
And get this.
My friend Tim has this uncle
who's an FBI agent
who worked on the case,
and he agreed
to tell me what he saw...
On the 17th floor.
I wasn't just obsessed
with Bernie Madoff.
I was obsessed with anyone
who had a connection to him,
and they kept coming
one after the other.
I interviewed them,
went back to my studio,
and turned their stories
into songs.
I was being sucked deeper
and deeper into my obsession.
[upbeat music]
The sharks were hungry
They were all jumpin' in
They knew there was money
to be made
But when the captain
abandoned ship
It turned out he'd never
done a single trade
He had an office in London
and a residence in France
And a summer home
in the Hamptons
And a whole lot of people
livin' high on the hog
Makin' the magic happen
Down on the 17th floor
Now I was workin'
insurance fraud
Medicare, Medicaid,
Russians making a killing
And then one morning
I got the call
To report down
to the Lipstick Building
Madoff's operation
took up three floors
We combed through every one
We packed it all up
and sent it to a warehouse
As evidence
Of what happened
Down on the 17th floor
[upbeat music]
The 18th floor
was lavishly decorated
Black leather
and silver everywhere
There was a sculpture
of a bull
And this giant silver screw
Like a symbol
of what he did down there
The 17th floor was like
a hoarder's paradise
Wall to wall banker's boxes
It didn't look good
Didn't have to look good
To do what they did
Down on the 17th floor
[upbeat music]
The sharks were hungry
They were all jumpin' in
They knew there was money
to be made
But when the captain
abandoned ship
It turned out he'd never
done a single trade
Now other cases have a lot
of very good investigations
But they all lead
to a dry hole
Just money in the wind
This one's different
There's a lot of assets
We're gonna get some money
back to the victims
Of what happened
down on the 17th floor
[upbeat music]
[police siren wailing]
I kept thinking about
that synagogue in Palm Beach
where they recited the Kaddish
for Madoff.
[soft orchestral music]
So I called my friend's mom back
and asked her to tell me more,
but she had no idea
what I was talking about.
[soft orchestral music]
[All] There was hugging
and crying among the victims,
but there was no Kaddish
for Madoff.
- But I remembered her
telling me that.
I mean, I heard her say it.
Did I imagine it?
Did I dream it?
Or was it
some ancient Jewish memory
of excommunication surfacing?
Either way, the truth is I hated
thinking about Madoff as a Jew.
I mean, he's pretty much
the definition of bad
for the Jews.
-Mm-hmm.
-Hm.
But you know, on Yom Kippur,
we recite
these confessional prayers
where we go down
the Hebrew alphabet
listing the sins
we've committed,
and we say them all
in the plural.
Ashamnu, Bagadnu,
Gazalnu, Dibarnu Dofi.
We have been adulterous,
we have betrayed.
We have committed slander,
we have deceived.
There's this idea
that even though no one person
could possibly have done
all these things wrong,
as a community,
we are responsible
for each other.
We are all connected.
A Kabbalistic text.
God is one.
God's secret is one.
The entire chain of being
is one.
Down to the last link,
everything is linked
with everything else.
Divine essence is below
as well as above,
in heaven and on earth,
there is nothing else.
I felt stuck.
What should we do with him?
Excommunication
or radical compassion?
We could say a Kaddish
and be done with him forever.
But if the mystics are right
and we're all connected,
maybe this story was
bigger than any one person.
Dear Bernie...
You went from being one
of the geniuses of Wall Street
to a total pariah.
And there's this in-between time
between your confession
and your sentencing.
You're under house arrest
with your wife Ruth
in your Upper East Side
apartment.
You're holed up in this
perfect world you created
while everything crumbles
around you.
Your sons, Andy and Mark,
who worked for you
most of their lives,
are no longer speaking to you.
Paparazzi are swarming
the block.
And during this time,
you write a letter
of apology to the residents
of your building
and have it slipped
beneath their doors,
as if you still might be
the president
of your building's
condo board,
as if things
might still be okay.
[soft orchestral music]
Dear neighbors...
Please accept
My profound
Apologies
For the terrible
Inconvenience
I have caused
Over the past weeks
Ruth and I
Appreciate
The support
We have
Received
Okay.
[soft violin music]
And then I did
what any artist does
when something
drives them crazy--
I made it into art.
I would take all these stories
swirling around in my head
and try to make sense
out of them.
It was still a mess,
but now it would be my mess.
One day, maybe I'd show
my work to the world,
but first I'd subject
my friends to it.
Would they like it?
Would it be any good?
Or had I totally lost it?
It was 4:00 in the morning.
I was almost too tired to care.
Almost.
[soft violin music]
[people chattering]
His returns
were not spectacular.
What was spectacular
was the consistency.
Markets go up, markets go down.
But Madoff's returns went up
in a straight line,
more or less, for 40 years.
Who wouldn't want
that kind of security?
No downturn, just growth.
No failure, no loss.
It's beautiful.
But they were just making up
numbers on the 17th floor.
Each day they'd wait
until the trading day ended,
decide how much the accounts
should be worth,
then create false reports
of trades that never happened
based on the actual
stock trading prices.
Now, many people assume
that Madoff's victims
simply handed their money over
and walked away.
But that was not the case
with the people I talked to.
[soft cello]
Follow me.
[people chattering]
Ooh.
I'm going to have to
call you back, okay?
All right, bye.
[soft cello]
I have the most magnificent
statements
Very detailed
stocks and prices
Of course I opened them
I opened every one
It certainly looked
like a totally active
Brokerage account
[soft cello]
Whenever we needed
The funds
I'd call the office,
and they'd mail me a check
I helped
my five grandchildren
Through college
with that money
Buy homes with that money
By the end, I'd used up
a good bit of the
Principal, principal
[clapping]
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Yeah, it worked out
for a few people,
but for everyone else,
it was a tragedy.
Imagine saving up for years,
then waking up one morning
and checking your account
balance, and it's just zero.
[melancholy music]
Zero isn't just about money.
It's about lies and betrayal,
and in a society where we
don't take care of the elderly,
it's also about survival.
A lot of people think
only the super wealthy
invested with Madoff,
but he had a lot
of middle-class investors, too.
Many of them used their accounts
like a 401k.
Each month
they'd put a little in
so they'd have enough
to live off when they retired,
and then
it all just disappeared.
[bubbling cauldron]
By this point, the scam
had gone on for so long
that many of his investors were
over 70 and already retired.
The lucky ones had family
who could take them in
or were healthy enough
to start working again.
"I'm taking care of my
sick mother-in-law,"
one 73-year-old victim
wrote The New York Times.
"My wife has cancer.
I just can't deal with it.
I'm cooked."
Dear Bernie...
You will be cursed in the city
and cursed in the country.
Your basket and your kneading
trough will be cursed.
The calves of your herd
will be cursed
and the lambs of your flock.
You will be cursed going in
and cursed coming out.
You will come to ruin because
of the evil you have done.
Day after day, you'll be
oppressed and robbed.
[All]
You will sow much seed
in the field
But you will harvest little
Because locusts
will devour it
You will plant vineyards
and cultivate them
But you will not
drink the wine
Or harvest the grapes
Because the worms
will eat them
You will have children
But you will not keep them
[tense music]
[people chattering]
Then my uncle put me
in touch with his colleague,
a therapist whose mother
lost everything to Madoff.
[Therapist] I'd be happy
to tell you our story.
Like many of his victims,
we were just a typical
Eastern European Jewish family.
[soft, upbeat music]
My grandfather deserted
the Czar's army
And came here at 17
He had a small business
in boy's apparel
Oh, my grandfather came here
at 17
[bright, upbeat music]
My parents grew up
in the Bronx
They met at 13
And my father became
an orthodontist
They moved to Long Island
when I was 3
But my parents grew up
in the Bronx
They joined a country club
Played golf
and had a nice life
All their childhood friends
became doctors
And lawyers and wives
Then an accountant friend
who they'd known forever
Said he had
A new connection
To this genius investor
And that's how they got in
with Bernie Madoff
And the accountant lost
all his own money, too
[bright, upbeat music]
When my father died,
my mother sorta fell apart
She was lost without my dad
But her Madoff account
made her feel secure
She had a steady return
in good times and bad
She had piles and piles
of statements
She would copy
all the numbers
On the outside
of the envelopes
She began to lose
Her memory
But she had a steady return
in good times and bad
If the men of my family
were alive
To see they'd got taken
It would've meant
psychological devastation
To know that they got taken
That they failed
In that way
That they lost
all the money
They worked so hard to save
My heart goes out
To the men
who are still alive
I read it in the paper,
and I called my brother
And he said, "I'm reading
the Times, I know"
And an image
came into my mind
Of a gun that went puff
with smoke
All the whole thing,
all the money was gone
All the money was gone
in a puff of smoke
In a puff of smoke
All the money was gone
[bright, upbeat music]
They sold the house
in Long Island
And we drove my mother
down to a nursing home
In New Jersey
We didn't say
where we were going
But I think
she might have known
She held the keys
to her house
In her hand
the whole way down
They joined a country club
Played golf
and had a nice life
All their childhood friends
Became doctors
and lawyers and wives
Then an accountant friend
who they'd known forever
Said he had
A new connection
To this genius investor
My parents both grew up
in the Bronx
And my grandfather came here
at 17
Scams like Madoff's
are sometimes called
affinity schemes
because the scammers prey
on people
from their own communities.
Charles Ponzi,
the original Ponzi schemer,
was an Italian immigrant
who targeted
other Italian-Americans.
So it's not a coincidence
that most of Madoff's victims
were the sons and daughters
and grandchildren
of Jewish immigrants
who came here
with very little.
Like Madoff's family.
We trust people
who are like us.
[soft music]
[soft music]
"The alleged Madoff
fraud is now being viewed
"as a classic Ponzi scheme
in which new money
"from some investors was
used to fund withdrawals
"of fictitious profits
for other investors.
"The trustee, Irving Picard,
said that he would go after
"or 'claw back'
the profits of investors
who withdrew far more money
than they contributed."
[soft music]
Hm.
Those victims who were being
sued,
they needed lawyers,
and I know it sounds
like I'm making this up,
but I swear,
I was friends with a poet
who knew one of those lawyers.
As an attorney
I mostly represent
The infamous one percent
But if you ask me
where my sympathies lie
They're with the 99
[bright, upbeat music]
Have you heard
about the Ibbotson Curve?
This researcher at Yale,
I think
Plotted the rates of return
of various investments
And at the end
of a very long time
Stocks did the best
Thus proving that equities
will always continue to rise
Or could it just be
coincidence
That you're in the amazing
century of American power
And equities did well
[soft rock music]
[bright, upbeat music]
My clients are called net
winners in the Madoff case
Because they withdrew
more than they put
Into their Madoff accounts
And now
the court-appointed trustee
Irving Picard is suing them
Clawing back
For the difference
in the amounts
But if the SEC didn't
stop Bernie Madoff
Even though they had
all the information
What about my clients
How should they have known
-[soft rock music]
-[cello solo]
[upbeat music]
Now as for Bernie Madoff
You really gotta wonder
what was he thinking
What was
that pathology there
Personally I think
he's a grade A jackass
A grade A jackass
And very few people knew
He was just makin' shit up
Oh, very few people knew
he was just makin' shit up
[bright, upbeat music]
The basic dynamics of investment
are fraudulent in many ways.
It's a fallacy
that humans can pick stocks
better than randomness.
There's this coin flipping
experiment.
Say you have a hundred people,
you give them all quarters,
and you say you'll eliminate
them if they flip tails.
After one flip,
you're down to 50 people,
after two flips 25,
after seven or eight flips,
you're down to maybe one guy
who's flipped heads
every single time.
Now, in the financial world,
he'd be lauded
as a stock picking genius.
He'd be making top dollar
managing a hedge fund somewhere.
When in actuality,
he's just really fucking lucky.
Now do I own equities?
Sure
But do I have
this touching faith
They'll do better
in the long run
No
[clicking]
[soft music]
By this point
I was pretty convinced
Madoff wasn't the only one
to blame,
that the American financial
system itself was complicit.
How was the economy
supposed to keep
growing and growing forever?
I still felt some shame
about Madoff being Jewish,
but now I understood
this was common.
When someone from a majority
culture commits a crime,
we see them as a person.
But when they're
from a minority group,
there's a false sense that
they represent that culture
and others from the
group
often feel
a sense of responsibility
for something
they had nothing to do with.
At the same time
on the deepest human level,
I was starting to think
we all had
a little bit
of Bernie Madoff inside us,
the temptation to give people
what they want,
tell them
what they want to hear,
instead of dealing
with reality.
Dear Bernie, you're
probably a grade A jackass
like the lawyer said,
but you couldn't
have done it alone.
You needed a whole system
to support you,
a whole way of life.
You needed a culture
where people don't have to
look out for one another.
Where our job is
just to survive.
Where the only way to be safe--
to make a lot of money
and put it somewhere far away
where no one could touch it,
where we know it'll be
there waiting for us
one day far off in the future,
when we really need it.
[tense violin music]
$65 billion dollars lost.
Retirement savings
drained of every cent.
Entire charities emptied out.
Universities
struggling to survive.
Pension funds depleted.
And three people
who took their own lives
when the curtain
was pulled away...
a French nobleman
who lost a billion dollars
of his clients' money,
a British veteran who lost
his family's life savings,
and Bernie and Ruth's
older son Mark.
He worked on the 19th floor
and claimed he never knew
what happened on the 17th,
but no one believed him.
He became a pariah
in the finance world
like his father.
No one would hire him.
He was repeatedly sued.
He hanged himself
on the second anniversary
of his father's arrest.
Four years later, his brother
Andrew died of cancer.
[soft violin music]
Winter turned to spring.
The banks got bailed out.
The Southern district
of New York City
gave Bernie Madoff
150 years in jail.
And it was just
barely warm enough
to entertain the tourists
by playing my violin
on Wall Street.
Are you an outlier
or a trend
Just an aberration
Or the beginning of the end
Of a dream
And now we wake
[soft acoustic music]
And is this story new
Or is it old
And is it different
every time it's told
Or is this just the music
That broken vessels make
Dear Bernie, how did
the whole thing start?
Were you a mastermind
or just a common criminal?
That's what some people think.
Early on you made
some investment mistakes
you were afraid
to admit to your clients,
so you borrowed from other
accounts to cover them up.
A little here, a little there.
And meanwhile, people
started clamoring to get in,
and you let them.
You were afraid
to tell the truth,
so you let the lie
get bigger and bigger.
You let it grow
into this giant black hole.
I talked to a Buddhist monk
the other day.
He also happens to be a Jew.
I thought maybe
he could help me.
And he said...
[Monk]
You could almost say
Madoff was delivering
the Messiah.
This is the era of perfection.
The faithful will enter into it,
but in Judaism,
the Messiah is in the future.
And as for you, Alicia,
you want me to explain this,
but you can't understand
what happened
without looking at yourself,
your own desire for control,
your wish to succeed,
to be safe,
never to stumble, never to fail.
We live in a time
when it's easy to believe
that a life without loss
might be possible.
[Alicia]
Something happened
In the last 100 years
With ever more elaborate
financial instruments
Allowing us to make
fabulous amounts
Of money
From nothing
We start to believe
it's possible to escape
It never could happen
Before
But now there's a way
We start to develop
this unconscious faith
That money can protect us
from tragedy and old age
And there will only be
An upside
There will only be
An upside
[soft violin music]
The only transcendence
is fully embracing
The ups and the downs
And even then
We all grow old and die
The only transcendence
is fully embracing
The ups and the downs
And even then
-[soft music]
-[cars passing]
Our residency was almost over
when I understood
what I had to do.
Before we said goodbye,
I needed to create
one final performance,
a ritual excommunication,
a Kaddish for Bernie Madoff.
We'd use the mourning customs
of the Jewish people
to say goodbye to him
and everything he represented
because he was dead to us.
He was human,
but he'd lost his humanity.
I was saying goodbye
to something else, too,
something closer to home:
the Bernie Madoff
inside each of us,
the perfectionist who would
do anything for control,
the part of me
that was terrified
of admitting my mistakes,
my failures.
I finally understood,
confronting Bernie
was confronting myself.
A world without failure,
a line that goes up and up.
It's beautiful,
but it's impossible.
In the Kabbalistic
creation myth,
even God messes up.
[soft violin picking]
Bring me your empty jar
I will fill it,
I will fill it
Where it comes from,
where it goes
I can't tell you,
no one knows
At first God was everywhere,
just this infinite light
without any interruption.
And in order to create anything,
God had to withdraw,
making a sort of black hole
at the center of the universe.
And in that space, God made
a world of small clay vessels,
but they were inanimate.
So for the final step,
God channeled divine energy
into the vessels
to give them life,
but the vessels couldn't
handle the power of the light.
They couldn't sustain it.
So they cracked and they
shattered and they fell down,
and that's the world.
The world is broken,
a collection of fallen shards,
each with a little bit
of light trapped at its center,
a little spark
of divine energy.
And our job
as we move through the world
is to find those sparks.
Do you know how medieval Jews
would excommunicate someone
convicted of a terrible crime?
First, they would gather.
Then they would blow the shofar,
the ram's horn,
in front of the Torah.
They would lament,
holding candles of mourning.
The rabbi would shout
biblical curses at the person
being excommunicated.
He would warn the community
never to speak
to that person again.
The people would cry,
and they would extinguish
their candles.
Dear Bernie,
I wrote this Kaddish for you.
[soft music]
Yit-gadal v'yit-kadash
Sh'may raba
B'alma dee-v'ra che-ru-tay
B'alma dee-v'ra che-ru-tay
Ve'yam-lich mal-chutay
B'chai-yay-chon
B'chai-yay-chon
Uv'yo-may-chon
Uv'yo-may-chon
Uv-cha-yay
D'chol beit Yisrael
Ba-agala u'vize-man ka-riv
Ve'imru amen
Y'hay sh'may raba me'vorach
Le-alam ul-almay alma-ya
-[lyrics overlapping]
-Yit-barach v'yish-tabach
V'yit-pa-ar v'yit-romam
V'yit-nasay, v'yit-hadar
V'yit-aleh
V'yit-halal sh'may
D'koo-d'shah, b'rich hoo
V'yit-halal sh'may
d'koo-d'shah, b'rich hoo
Layla meen kol beer-chata
v'she-rata
Layla meen kol
beer-chata v'she-rata
Toosh-b'chata
V'ne-ch'mata
Da-amiran b'alma
Ve'imru amen
Y'hay sh'lama raba
meen sh'maya
V'cha-yim aleynu
V'al kol Yisrael
Ve'imru amen
Toosh-b'chata
V'ne-ch'mata...
And with that Kaddish
I said goodbye
to my obsession
with Bernie Madoff
and goodbye to my studio
on Wall Street.
But I knew there was no way
to separate myself
entirely from any of it.
The money, the stock market,
my fellow artists,
everyone I'd interviewed,
America, the whole world.
Everything was connected.
Soon some business would
rent out this floor
and use it to make money.
My fellow artists and I
would scatter
across New York City,
each of us looking
for some other space
where we could try to make
sense of the world around us.
Bernie Madoff himself
would leave this earth,
but another scam artist
would rise to take his place,
and we would do
what we always do.
[All] Amen.
Look at the world around us
and make beauty
out of the brokenness.
[soft music]
[soft classical music]
[upbeat jazzy music]
[somber music]
[soft music]
Bring me
Bring me
I will fill it
Where it comes from
I can't tell you
Bring me
Your empty jar
I will fill it
I will fill it
Where it comes from
Where it goes
I can't tell you
No one knows
[Alicia narrating]
2008 was a weird year.
Facebook had just hit
100 million users,
the stock market was
at an all-time high,
the sort of high
that comes before a crash,
and I was an artist working
in an office on Wall Street.
It wasn't a normal office.
It was an entire empty floor
that this nonprofit
had convinced the landlord
to give
to a bunch of artists
for free for a year.
[elevator dings]
And that's
where my story begins.
-Hey.
-[Man] Hi.
[Alicia narrating]
Have you ever been
in a completely empty floor
of an office building?
The names of cities
still on the wall,
a blank space above them
where clocks once hung,
a vast sea of cubicles
which once held workers
who spent
their waking lives here.
Floors marked
with scuffs from shoes
that walked back and forth,
and back and forth.
There's something
post-apocalyptic about it.
It's like walking
through the ruins
of a once-great civilization.
[tuning violin]
I had been applying to artists'
residencies for a long time
before finally getting
this one.
A year of free space
in Manhattan was a big deal,
and I wanted
to make the most of it.
I loved my day job
teaching bat mitzvah girls
how to chant from the Torah,
but I thought maybe
this would be the year
I would finally break through
as an artist.
The problem was I hadn't
made anything for months.
I secretly hoped
this new office
might give me new courage.
Maybe I'd create some big,
ambitious performance here.
Maybe it would even
be marketable.
But as the Yiddish saying goes,
man plans and God laughs.
[cars honking]
The Financial District,
like the rest of New York City,
is an improbable combination.
Gleaming and grimy,
fancy and cheap, everything
butted up against each other,
jostling for a space.
Each day, I'd ride my bike
in from Brooklyn
over the Williamsburg Bridge,
down through
the Lower East Side,
past the tenement buildings
where my great-grandparents
once lived.
[elevator beeping]
[elevator dings]
[soft string music]
Then one day I saw a man in
the office across the street.
He put his head
down on his desk
and left it there
for a long time.
[Woman on radio]
We begin with Wall Street,
and the news today isn't
getting any better.
[loud voices of traders
on radio]
[Man #1 on radio]
There's just panic in the air.
[Man #2] Wall Street treated
the American economy
like a casino.
[Man #3]
Not in generations
has Wall Street absorbed
the number of body blows
it took today.
[Man #4]
The American financial system
is rocked to its foundation
as top Wall Street
institutions topple
under a mountain of debt.
[Man #5]
It is definitely
a very, very difficult time,
and it's not gonna
get better quickly.
[Alicia narrating]
And then Bernie Madoff
turned himself in.
His 40-year hedge fund was
actually a giant Ponzi scheme,
the largest financial crime
in history.
[Woman #1 on radio]
Until this week,
Bernie Madoff
was a lion of Wall Street.
He managed one of the most
successful hedge funds,
then FBI agents...
[Woman #2]
"$50 billion Ponzi scheme..."
[Woman #3] One of the biggest
Ponzi schemes ever
is reverberating throughout
the world today...
[Man #6]
...The NASDAQ stock market.
Many people
are starting to believe
it may have been
from the very beginning.
[Woman #4] How could
he pull this off by himself?
[Man #6]
It seems almost impossible.
[Woman #5]
All fake, all fake. A novel.
[Interviewer on radio]
Your statement's a novel?
[Woman #5]
Yes, unfortunately.
[sighs]
Oh, my God.
He looks like my dad.
He has kind eyes.
[sighs]
[Alicia narrating]
And that was the beginning
of my obsession
with Bernie Madoff.
We were a community of artists
on the ninth floor
with ink on our fingers
and paint on our faces.
We each had our projects,
our insecurities,
our secret fears.
As for me,
I couldn't stop talking
about the giant fraud that
happened right down the street.
-[Patricia] Hey.
-Hey.
Nice Christmas lights.
Thanks.
[Patricia]
What's he doing on your wall?
The whole thing is crazy.
He grew up in Long Island
without much money,
he got mediocre grades,
he married his high school
sweetheart Ruth.
He's like a totally normal guy.
He started his financial
business with money
he saved up lifeguarding and
installing sprinkler systems.
[Patricia]
Huh.
[Alicia]
Doesn't make sense.
He never studied
economics or finance,
but his company helped invent
the computer trading system
that modernized
the stock market.
And even when he got
rich, he didn't flaunt it,
not by the standards
of Wall Street.
He was more
like some friendly uncle
people trusted
with their money.
-Hm.
-He was this big philanthropist,
but all the money he gave
away was stolen money.
He made this whole thing up
from scratch,
and he brought his two sons
into the office to work for him.
Wow.
-[people chattering]
-[upbeat indie rock music]
[Alicia narrating]
As fall turned to winter,
I'm sure my growing obsession
made me pretty annoying
to my fellow artists,
but by the time of our January
artists' salon,
Bernie Madoff was starting
to work his way
into other people's lives, too.
Is he a sociopath
or just a common criminal?
I know. And get this.
I just found out
my best friend's grandfather
put him through college
with the money
-he earned from Madoff.
-What?
My boyfriend's uncle's
a lawyer,
and he's representing
three of the victims.
[gasps]
Holy shit.
I'm one degree
from Bernie Madoff.
[phone ringing]
-Hey, Mom.
-Hey, honey.
Remember my college roommate
Evelyn?
She works in finance,
and boy does she have
a Madoff story for you!
[Alicia narrating]
I met with Evelyn
in her office
just a few blocks from mine.
As she spoke, her words
began to form themselves
into a song in my head.
This was the first time,
but it wouldn't be the last.
[minimal electric guitar music]
My name is Evelyn
I was the credit risk
officer at a major bank
Which shall go unnamed
My job was to approve any
funds the bank would use
Due diligence
One day they asked me
To approve
Bernard Madoff Securities
So I tried to do
An analysis
Due diligence
But I couldn't get
any information
Everyone said Bernie Madoff
Was the president
of NASDAQ
Bernie's been in business
for 40 years
How dare you ask
Now this was a red flag.
Why no information?
So I went to speak
with a colleague,
a very knowledgeable person
who doesn't
take things at face value.
I said I'm being asked
to approve Bernie Madoff.
"What do you think?"
And she said, "Evelyn, I've been
watching Madoff for years."
Something's wrong there.
I don't know what.
It could be insider trading,
it could be fake returns.
I don't know, but I wouldn't
touch him with a 10 foot pole.
So down the hall,
I went to tell them
I cannot approve
this investment
Despite
its stellar returns
I find no proof
these returns are legal
Nor evidence
of a trading strategy
On the part
of Madoff Securities
Well, they were furious
with me
I later found out
they had wanted to fire me
I did leave that bank
eventually
But that's normal
in the industry
Three years later,
the scandal broke,
and the next morning
I received a call at home.
It was an apology
from one of my old bosses.
Now, this might not
sound like much to you.
but you have to understand
this industry is--
you don't look back.
No one admits mistakes.
You just move forward.
It attracts alpha personalities.
There's no culture
of apology
So for that man to call me
and say what he said
was like anyone else
sending a huge bouquet.
-Just a room
Full of flowers
-[soft music]
[soft music]
Blossoms come about
because a series
of conditions
lead up to their blooming.
Leaves are blown away
because a series of conditions
lead up to their falling.
Due diligence.
Everything is created
by a series
of causes and conditions.
-[soft music]
-[leaves rustling]
[Alicia narrating]
News of Madoff's crimes
continued to unfold.
Stories came in
from all over the country
and they started
to draw me into these
weird little worlds
like Palm Beach, Florida,
one of the hardest hit places
where a lot of people
lost a lot of money.
[phone ringing]
Hello.
Hi. This is Alicia.
You said you'd be willing
to talk to me?
It's that girl.
Country clubs here
didn't allow Jews in until 1965.
So we made our own country club.
The Madoffs had
a house here in Palm Beach,
and they belonged
to that Jewish country club.
People would join just
to get close to Bernie
to get a chance to
possibly invest with him.
Mm-hmm.
My best friend lost everything.
What do you think the rabbi
did at services that week?
I don't know.
-I never go.
-Me, neither.
Actually, I have this friend.
She plays accordion.
Her mom lives down in West
Palm Beach across the tracks,
and she told me
the congregation recited
the Kaddish for Bernie Madoff.
[Woman]
Maybe they should.
Mm-hmm.
The ladies got me wondering,
should we all be saying
a Kaddish for Bernie Madoff?
If you don't know
the Kaddish prayer,
this might not sound
like such a crazy idea.
But here's the thing.
The Kaddish is one of the
holiest Jewish prayers.
We use it
as a prayer for the dead,
although there's no mention
of death in it at all.
The words are in ancient Aramaic
and they're
all about praising God--
May God be glorified
and exalted
and raised up and blessed.
According to tradition,
saying this prayer helps
a dead person's soul
ascend to heaven.
You don't say a Kaddish
for someone who's alive,
except in one
extremely rare case:
excommunication.
[women gasp]
If you were
to excommunicate someone
you'd observe
all the mourning rituals
as if they had actually died,
but that's a rare
and ancient practice,
and it's not the sort of thing
you expect to find
in Palm Beach.
And yet it did seem
like something ancient
was happening here,
something of our time,
but also beyond it.
So I started looking
for old ideas
about possessions and loss
and what really matters,
ideas from before
Bernie Madoff,
before Wall Street,
before America,
and I started turning them
into songs.
[soft violin music]
Blossoms come about
because a series of conditions
lead up to their blooming.
Blossoms do not appear
independently,
nor does a leaf fall of itself
out of its season,
so everything has its coming
forth and passing away.
Nothing can be independent
without any change.
It is the everlasting
And unchanging rule
Of this world
That everything is created
By a series of causes
and conditions
By a series
of causes and conditions
And everything disappears
By the same rule
Everything changes
Nothing remains constant
90 years after
my great-grandparents came
to America
from Eastern Europe,
my family was still Jewish
but not really religious
at all,
and we were the only Jewish
family in our neighborhood,
so I didn't know much
about my culture
until I turned 20
and got curious.
Now, being Jewish was
a big part of my identity,
and usually that made me proud.
But when I thought about
Bernie Madoff, I felt shame.
What did it mean
that he was from my tribe,
that he literally shared
my DNA?
And what about Wall Street?
Shouldn't they have known
something was wrong?
Was he that much of a genius,
or did they look the other way?
I had to understand more.
Conveniently,
a whole mini industry
of Madoff books
had just begun to emerge.
They always had
like The Magician of Lies:
How Bernie Madoff Killed Trust
or The Madoff Secret: Behind
Closed Doors on the 17th Floor.
My favorite was a best seller
by the Madoff whistleblower.
It was called
I Tried to Tell Them:
a True Crime In Modern Finance.
[upbeat music]
The author was a quant,
a math genius
working on Wall Street,
using equations
to make money for his firm.
He wrote...
[Man] I kept getting
in trouble with my bosses
because I couldn't match
Madoff's returns.
Then I started looking
into how he did it.
It didn't take long to realize
the whole thing
had to be a fraud.
Listen, back in 2005,
I handed the government
a detailed report entitled
"The World's Largest
Hedge Fund Is a Fraud."
The government ignored me.
[tense music]
There is no such thing
as a straight line
No such, no such
thing as a straight line
In finance
I knew as soon as I saw it
Yes,
I knew as soon as I saw it
I'm a quant
I understand these things
in a way most people can't
Futures contracts,
split strike conversions
I'm a quant, I can do
the math most people can't
I can
Mortgage backed,
asset backed
Collar trades,
mean reversions
Numbers exist
in relationship
That's how I knew I saw
a straight line
45 degree angle
Does not happen in finance
No matter how lucky
or smart you are
No matter
your secret strategy
Unless your secret
strategy is that
You're drawing the line
[gasps]
[metronome ticking]
I knew
I had to say something
But I also knew
these people were dangerous
The Russian mafia
might have been involved
So before I compile
my report
For the safety of myself
and my family
I had to buy a gun
[metronome ticking]
[upbeat music]
And in this new book
I've been reading,
it says Bernie loved straight
lines and right angles
and had, like,
almost a phobia of circles.
This one time he arrived
at his London office
to find they had installed
a video conferencing center
with a curved wall,
and he flew into a rage
and demanded they tear it down,
like, "I can't live with it.
It has to be square!"
[upbeat music]
[toilet flushes]
But he rented three floors
of the Lipstick Building,
which is an oval.
I guess the 18th and 19th floors
were a legitimate
trading business
he ran with his two sons.
Meanwhile, on the 17th floor,
they were, like,
making up numbers
and doing all the Ponzi stuff.
And get this.
My friend Tim has this uncle
who's an FBI agent
who worked on the case,
and he agreed
to tell me what he saw...
On the 17th floor.
I wasn't just obsessed
with Bernie Madoff.
I was obsessed with anyone
who had a connection to him,
and they kept coming
one after the other.
I interviewed them,
went back to my studio,
and turned their stories
into songs.
I was being sucked deeper
and deeper into my obsession.
[upbeat music]
The sharks were hungry
They were all jumpin' in
They knew there was money
to be made
But when the captain
abandoned ship
It turned out he'd never
done a single trade
He had an office in London
and a residence in France
And a summer home
in the Hamptons
And a whole lot of people
livin' high on the hog
Makin' the magic happen
Down on the 17th floor
Now I was workin'
insurance fraud
Medicare, Medicaid,
Russians making a killing
And then one morning
I got the call
To report down
to the Lipstick Building
Madoff's operation
took up three floors
We combed through every one
We packed it all up
and sent it to a warehouse
As evidence
Of what happened
Down on the 17th floor
[upbeat music]
The 18th floor
was lavishly decorated
Black leather
and silver everywhere
There was a sculpture
of a bull
And this giant silver screw
Like a symbol
of what he did down there
The 17th floor was like
a hoarder's paradise
Wall to wall banker's boxes
It didn't look good
Didn't have to look good
To do what they did
Down on the 17th floor
[upbeat music]
The sharks were hungry
They were all jumpin' in
They knew there was money
to be made
But when the captain
abandoned ship
It turned out he'd never
done a single trade
Now other cases have a lot
of very good investigations
But they all lead
to a dry hole
Just money in the wind
This one's different
There's a lot of assets
We're gonna get some money
back to the victims
Of what happened
down on the 17th floor
[upbeat music]
[police siren wailing]
I kept thinking about
that synagogue in Palm Beach
where they recited the Kaddish
for Madoff.
[soft orchestral music]
So I called my friend's mom back
and asked her to tell me more,
but she had no idea
what I was talking about.
[soft orchestral music]
[All] There was hugging
and crying among the victims,
but there was no Kaddish
for Madoff.
- But I remembered her
telling me that.
I mean, I heard her say it.
Did I imagine it?
Did I dream it?
Or was it
some ancient Jewish memory
of excommunication surfacing?
Either way, the truth is I hated
thinking about Madoff as a Jew.
I mean, he's pretty much
the definition of bad
for the Jews.
-Mm-hmm.
-Hm.
But you know, on Yom Kippur,
we recite
these confessional prayers
where we go down
the Hebrew alphabet
listing the sins
we've committed,
and we say them all
in the plural.
Ashamnu, Bagadnu,
Gazalnu, Dibarnu Dofi.
We have been adulterous,
we have betrayed.
We have committed slander,
we have deceived.
There's this idea
that even though no one person
could possibly have done
all these things wrong,
as a community,
we are responsible
for each other.
We are all connected.
A Kabbalistic text.
God is one.
God's secret is one.
The entire chain of being
is one.
Down to the last link,
everything is linked
with everything else.
Divine essence is below
as well as above,
in heaven and on earth,
there is nothing else.
I felt stuck.
What should we do with him?
Excommunication
or radical compassion?
We could say a Kaddish
and be done with him forever.
But if the mystics are right
and we're all connected,
maybe this story was
bigger than any one person.
Dear Bernie...
You went from being one
of the geniuses of Wall Street
to a total pariah.
And there's this in-between time
between your confession
and your sentencing.
You're under house arrest
with your wife Ruth
in your Upper East Side
apartment.
You're holed up in this
perfect world you created
while everything crumbles
around you.
Your sons, Andy and Mark,
who worked for you
most of their lives,
are no longer speaking to you.
Paparazzi are swarming
the block.
And during this time,
you write a letter
of apology to the residents
of your building
and have it slipped
beneath their doors,
as if you still might be
the president
of your building's
condo board,
as if things
might still be okay.
[soft orchestral music]
Dear neighbors...
Please accept
My profound
Apologies
For the terrible
Inconvenience
I have caused
Over the past weeks
Ruth and I
Appreciate
The support
We have
Received
Okay.
[soft violin music]
And then I did
what any artist does
when something
drives them crazy--
I made it into art.
I would take all these stories
swirling around in my head
and try to make sense
out of them.
It was still a mess,
but now it would be my mess.
One day, maybe I'd show
my work to the world,
but first I'd subject
my friends to it.
Would they like it?
Would it be any good?
Or had I totally lost it?
It was 4:00 in the morning.
I was almost too tired to care.
Almost.
[soft violin music]
[people chattering]
His returns
were not spectacular.
What was spectacular
was the consistency.
Markets go up, markets go down.
But Madoff's returns went up
in a straight line,
more or less, for 40 years.
Who wouldn't want
that kind of security?
No downturn, just growth.
No failure, no loss.
It's beautiful.
But they were just making up
numbers on the 17th floor.
Each day they'd wait
until the trading day ended,
decide how much the accounts
should be worth,
then create false reports
of trades that never happened
based on the actual
stock trading prices.
Now, many people assume
that Madoff's victims
simply handed their money over
and walked away.
But that was not the case
with the people I talked to.
[soft cello]
Follow me.
[people chattering]
Ooh.
I'm going to have to
call you back, okay?
All right, bye.
[soft cello]
I have the most magnificent
statements
Very detailed
stocks and prices
Of course I opened them
I opened every one
It certainly looked
like a totally active
Brokerage account
[soft cello]
Whenever we needed
The funds
I'd call the office,
and they'd mail me a check
I helped
my five grandchildren
Through college
with that money
Buy homes with that money
By the end, I'd used up
a good bit of the
Principal, principal
[clapping]
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Yeah, it worked out
for a few people,
but for everyone else,
it was a tragedy.
Imagine saving up for years,
then waking up one morning
and checking your account
balance, and it's just zero.
[melancholy music]
Zero isn't just about money.
It's about lies and betrayal,
and in a society where we
don't take care of the elderly,
it's also about survival.
A lot of people think
only the super wealthy
invested with Madoff,
but he had a lot
of middle-class investors, too.
Many of them used their accounts
like a 401k.
Each month
they'd put a little in
so they'd have enough
to live off when they retired,
and then
it all just disappeared.
[bubbling cauldron]
By this point, the scam
had gone on for so long
that many of his investors were
over 70 and already retired.
The lucky ones had family
who could take them in
or were healthy enough
to start working again.
"I'm taking care of my
sick mother-in-law,"
one 73-year-old victim
wrote The New York Times.
"My wife has cancer.
I just can't deal with it.
I'm cooked."
Dear Bernie...
You will be cursed in the city
and cursed in the country.
Your basket and your kneading
trough will be cursed.
The calves of your herd
will be cursed
and the lambs of your flock.
You will be cursed going in
and cursed coming out.
You will come to ruin because
of the evil you have done.
Day after day, you'll be
oppressed and robbed.
[All]
You will sow much seed
in the field
But you will harvest little
Because locusts
will devour it
You will plant vineyards
and cultivate them
But you will not
drink the wine
Or harvest the grapes
Because the worms
will eat them
You will have children
But you will not keep them
[tense music]
[people chattering]
Then my uncle put me
in touch with his colleague,
a therapist whose mother
lost everything to Madoff.
[Therapist] I'd be happy
to tell you our story.
Like many of his victims,
we were just a typical
Eastern European Jewish family.
[soft, upbeat music]
My grandfather deserted
the Czar's army
And came here at 17
He had a small business
in boy's apparel
Oh, my grandfather came here
at 17
[bright, upbeat music]
My parents grew up
in the Bronx
They met at 13
And my father became
an orthodontist
They moved to Long Island
when I was 3
But my parents grew up
in the Bronx
They joined a country club
Played golf
and had a nice life
All their childhood friends
became doctors
And lawyers and wives
Then an accountant friend
who they'd known forever
Said he had
A new connection
To this genius investor
And that's how they got in
with Bernie Madoff
And the accountant lost
all his own money, too
[bright, upbeat music]
When my father died,
my mother sorta fell apart
She was lost without my dad
But her Madoff account
made her feel secure
She had a steady return
in good times and bad
She had piles and piles
of statements
She would copy
all the numbers
On the outside
of the envelopes
She began to lose
Her memory
But she had a steady return
in good times and bad
If the men of my family
were alive
To see they'd got taken
It would've meant
psychological devastation
To know that they got taken
That they failed
In that way
That they lost
all the money
They worked so hard to save
My heart goes out
To the men
who are still alive
I read it in the paper,
and I called my brother
And he said, "I'm reading
the Times, I know"
And an image
came into my mind
Of a gun that went puff
with smoke
All the whole thing,
all the money was gone
All the money was gone
in a puff of smoke
In a puff of smoke
All the money was gone
[bright, upbeat music]
They sold the house
in Long Island
And we drove my mother
down to a nursing home
In New Jersey
We didn't say
where we were going
But I think
she might have known
She held the keys
to her house
In her hand
the whole way down
They joined a country club
Played golf
and had a nice life
All their childhood friends
Became doctors
and lawyers and wives
Then an accountant friend
who they'd known forever
Said he had
A new connection
To this genius investor
My parents both grew up
in the Bronx
And my grandfather came here
at 17
Scams like Madoff's
are sometimes called
affinity schemes
because the scammers prey
on people
from their own communities.
Charles Ponzi,
the original Ponzi schemer,
was an Italian immigrant
who targeted
other Italian-Americans.
So it's not a coincidence
that most of Madoff's victims
were the sons and daughters
and grandchildren
of Jewish immigrants
who came here
with very little.
Like Madoff's family.
We trust people
who are like us.
[soft music]
[soft music]
"The alleged Madoff
fraud is now being viewed
"as a classic Ponzi scheme
in which new money
"from some investors was
used to fund withdrawals
"of fictitious profits
for other investors.
"The trustee, Irving Picard,
said that he would go after
"or 'claw back'
the profits of investors
who withdrew far more money
than they contributed."
[soft music]
Hm.
Those victims who were being
sued,
they needed lawyers,
and I know it sounds
like I'm making this up,
but I swear,
I was friends with a poet
who knew one of those lawyers.
As an attorney
I mostly represent
The infamous one percent
But if you ask me
where my sympathies lie
They're with the 99
[bright, upbeat music]
Have you heard
about the Ibbotson Curve?
This researcher at Yale,
I think
Plotted the rates of return
of various investments
And at the end
of a very long time
Stocks did the best
Thus proving that equities
will always continue to rise
Or could it just be
coincidence
That you're in the amazing
century of American power
And equities did well
[soft rock music]
[bright, upbeat music]
My clients are called net
winners in the Madoff case
Because they withdrew
more than they put
Into their Madoff accounts
And now
the court-appointed trustee
Irving Picard is suing them
Clawing back
For the difference
in the amounts
But if the SEC didn't
stop Bernie Madoff
Even though they had
all the information
What about my clients
How should they have known
-[soft rock music]
-[cello solo]
[upbeat music]
Now as for Bernie Madoff
You really gotta wonder
what was he thinking
What was
that pathology there
Personally I think
he's a grade A jackass
A grade A jackass
And very few people knew
He was just makin' shit up
Oh, very few people knew
he was just makin' shit up
[bright, upbeat music]
The basic dynamics of investment
are fraudulent in many ways.
It's a fallacy
that humans can pick stocks
better than randomness.
There's this coin flipping
experiment.
Say you have a hundred people,
you give them all quarters,
and you say you'll eliminate
them if they flip tails.
After one flip,
you're down to 50 people,
after two flips 25,
after seven or eight flips,
you're down to maybe one guy
who's flipped heads
every single time.
Now, in the financial world,
he'd be lauded
as a stock picking genius.
He'd be making top dollar
managing a hedge fund somewhere.
When in actuality,
he's just really fucking lucky.
Now do I own equities?
Sure
But do I have
this touching faith
They'll do better
in the long run
No
[clicking]
[soft music]
By this point
I was pretty convinced
Madoff wasn't the only one
to blame,
that the American financial
system itself was complicit.
How was the economy
supposed to keep
growing and growing forever?
I still felt some shame
about Madoff being Jewish,
but now I understood
this was common.
When someone from a majority
culture commits a crime,
we see them as a person.
But when they're
from a minority group,
there's a false sense that
they represent that culture
and others from the
group
often feel
a sense of responsibility
for something
they had nothing to do with.
At the same time
on the deepest human level,
I was starting to think
we all had
a little bit
of Bernie Madoff inside us,
the temptation to give people
what they want,
tell them
what they want to hear,
instead of dealing
with reality.
Dear Bernie, you're
probably a grade A jackass
like the lawyer said,
but you couldn't
have done it alone.
You needed a whole system
to support you,
a whole way of life.
You needed a culture
where people don't have to
look out for one another.
Where our job is
just to survive.
Where the only way to be safe--
to make a lot of money
and put it somewhere far away
where no one could touch it,
where we know it'll be
there waiting for us
one day far off in the future,
when we really need it.
[tense violin music]
$65 billion dollars lost.
Retirement savings
drained of every cent.
Entire charities emptied out.
Universities
struggling to survive.
Pension funds depleted.
And three people
who took their own lives
when the curtain
was pulled away...
a French nobleman
who lost a billion dollars
of his clients' money,
a British veteran who lost
his family's life savings,
and Bernie and Ruth's
older son Mark.
He worked on the 19th floor
and claimed he never knew
what happened on the 17th,
but no one believed him.
He became a pariah
in the finance world
like his father.
No one would hire him.
He was repeatedly sued.
He hanged himself
on the second anniversary
of his father's arrest.
Four years later, his brother
Andrew died of cancer.
[soft violin music]
Winter turned to spring.
The banks got bailed out.
The Southern district
of New York City
gave Bernie Madoff
150 years in jail.
And it was just
barely warm enough
to entertain the tourists
by playing my violin
on Wall Street.
Are you an outlier
or a trend
Just an aberration
Or the beginning of the end
Of a dream
And now we wake
[soft acoustic music]
And is this story new
Or is it old
And is it different
every time it's told
Or is this just the music
That broken vessels make
Dear Bernie, how did
the whole thing start?
Were you a mastermind
or just a common criminal?
That's what some people think.
Early on you made
some investment mistakes
you were afraid
to admit to your clients,
so you borrowed from other
accounts to cover them up.
A little here, a little there.
And meanwhile, people
started clamoring to get in,
and you let them.
You were afraid
to tell the truth,
so you let the lie
get bigger and bigger.
You let it grow
into this giant black hole.
I talked to a Buddhist monk
the other day.
He also happens to be a Jew.
I thought maybe
he could help me.
And he said...
[Monk]
You could almost say
Madoff was delivering
the Messiah.
This is the era of perfection.
The faithful will enter into it,
but in Judaism,
the Messiah is in the future.
And as for you, Alicia,
you want me to explain this,
but you can't understand
what happened
without looking at yourself,
your own desire for control,
your wish to succeed,
to be safe,
never to stumble, never to fail.
We live in a time
when it's easy to believe
that a life without loss
might be possible.
[Alicia]
Something happened
In the last 100 years
With ever more elaborate
financial instruments
Allowing us to make
fabulous amounts
Of money
From nothing
We start to believe
it's possible to escape
It never could happen
Before
But now there's a way
We start to develop
this unconscious faith
That money can protect us
from tragedy and old age
And there will only be
An upside
There will only be
An upside
[soft violin music]
The only transcendence
is fully embracing
The ups and the downs
And even then
We all grow old and die
The only transcendence
is fully embracing
The ups and the downs
And even then
-[soft music]
-[cars passing]
Our residency was almost over
when I understood
what I had to do.
Before we said goodbye,
I needed to create
one final performance,
a ritual excommunication,
a Kaddish for Bernie Madoff.
We'd use the mourning customs
of the Jewish people
to say goodbye to him
and everything he represented
because he was dead to us.
He was human,
but he'd lost his humanity.
I was saying goodbye
to something else, too,
something closer to home:
the Bernie Madoff
inside each of us,
the perfectionist who would
do anything for control,
the part of me
that was terrified
of admitting my mistakes,
my failures.
I finally understood,
confronting Bernie
was confronting myself.
A world without failure,
a line that goes up and up.
It's beautiful,
but it's impossible.
In the Kabbalistic
creation myth,
even God messes up.
[soft violin picking]
Bring me your empty jar
I will fill it,
I will fill it
Where it comes from,
where it goes
I can't tell you,
no one knows
At first God was everywhere,
just this infinite light
without any interruption.
And in order to create anything,
God had to withdraw,
making a sort of black hole
at the center of the universe.
And in that space, God made
a world of small clay vessels,
but they were inanimate.
So for the final step,
God channeled divine energy
into the vessels
to give them life,
but the vessels couldn't
handle the power of the light.
They couldn't sustain it.
So they cracked and they
shattered and they fell down,
and that's the world.
The world is broken,
a collection of fallen shards,
each with a little bit
of light trapped at its center,
a little spark
of divine energy.
And our job
as we move through the world
is to find those sparks.
Do you know how medieval Jews
would excommunicate someone
convicted of a terrible crime?
First, they would gather.
Then they would blow the shofar,
the ram's horn,
in front of the Torah.
They would lament,
holding candles of mourning.
The rabbi would shout
biblical curses at the person
being excommunicated.
He would warn the community
never to speak
to that person again.
The people would cry,
and they would extinguish
their candles.
Dear Bernie,
I wrote this Kaddish for you.
[soft music]
Yit-gadal v'yit-kadash
Sh'may raba
B'alma dee-v'ra che-ru-tay
B'alma dee-v'ra che-ru-tay
Ve'yam-lich mal-chutay
B'chai-yay-chon
B'chai-yay-chon
Uv'yo-may-chon
Uv'yo-may-chon
Uv-cha-yay
D'chol beit Yisrael
Ba-agala u'vize-man ka-riv
Ve'imru amen
Y'hay sh'may raba me'vorach
Le-alam ul-almay alma-ya
-[lyrics overlapping]
-Yit-barach v'yish-tabach
V'yit-pa-ar v'yit-romam
V'yit-nasay, v'yit-hadar
V'yit-aleh
V'yit-halal sh'may
D'koo-d'shah, b'rich hoo
V'yit-halal sh'may
d'koo-d'shah, b'rich hoo
Layla meen kol beer-chata
v'she-rata
Layla meen kol
beer-chata v'she-rata
Toosh-b'chata
V'ne-ch'mata
Da-amiran b'alma
Ve'imru amen
Y'hay sh'lama raba
meen sh'maya
V'cha-yim aleynu
V'al kol Yisrael
Ve'imru amen
Toosh-b'chata
V'ne-ch'mata...
And with that Kaddish
I said goodbye
to my obsession
with Bernie Madoff
and goodbye to my studio
on Wall Street.
But I knew there was no way
to separate myself
entirely from any of it.
The money, the stock market,
my fellow artists,
everyone I'd interviewed,
America, the whole world.
Everything was connected.
Soon some business would
rent out this floor
and use it to make money.
My fellow artists and I
would scatter
across New York City,
each of us looking
for some other space
where we could try to make
sense of the world around us.
Bernie Madoff himself
would leave this earth,
but another scam artist
would rise to take his place,
and we would do
what we always do.
[All] Amen.
Look at the world around us
and make beauty
out of the brokenness.
[soft music]
[soft classical music]
[upbeat jazzy music]
[somber music]