Interesting to see facsimilies of letters to Judge Denny Chinn. The human suffering and rage which the Madoff’s book-cooking is something to behold.

Have a look at the pdf available at Nextbook.

The one from Phylis Lerner on page 41 is particularly striking.

Dear Judge Chin,

This letter can barely express the emotions that are behind its writing. It is frustrating not having the funds to be in NY to appear in the courtroom for both the March 12 hearing and this one, his sentencing, to speak against this evil perpetrator face to face. The angst, tears, depression and heart palpitations that he has caused cannot be felt on paper, but they are here. I am hoping this statement in writing is selected to be heard in court.

Statement

You, Bernard Madoff have committcd multiplc crimes.  There are crimes of securities fraud. money  laundering, mail and wire fraud.
Crimes to be added to this Iist are the abominations that have resulted from your massive scam.
You are a murderer. There have already been two suicides that have been publicly attributed to your deeds.  A check  into other recent suicides would probably reveal othcr incidents which familics have chosen to keep private.
You are a rapist. You have stolen one of the most intimate of personal properties. The self-esteem and fruits 0f a life’s work. You have ravaged dreams.
You are a larcenist. You have plundered and looted the savings ofthousands or victims while lining your pockets to provide an extravagant  lifestyle for yourself and your entire family. While your family is still living ‘HIGH’. you have forced many to poverty levels.
You committed generational theft. You have stolen not only from us but from our children and grandchildren who would have benefited from our life savings.
You have also disintegrated charities whose beneficiaries will  no longer receive necessary funds.

There is no person ofsound mind who actually believes that you acted alone and that your family, if not physically aiding and abctting your crimes. was unaware 0f foul play.

Justice would mean life imprisonment for you for the depredation you perpetrated, to be served in a regular prison  facility, living among common criminals who have conmilted all ofthe above mentioned crimes. No country club prison for you. You have had way too much of the country club life to the detriment of fellow members.
Justice would mean that your cntire family, including wife, sons, brother. niece et al  relinquish all monies and properties derived from their ill-gotten eamings and proceeds from any and all related Madoff businesses. And of course, if shown to have criminal connection would also serve time in prison. Your family members you are working so deviously to prolect should be forced to live at the same poverty level you have f’orced your clients and friends into. Why should your family live any belier than the most devastated of your vicitims?

You were in a position lo make a small auempt at restitulion.
That involved giving all  information as to the whereabouts ofyour hidden vaults of money.
That meanl giving intormation about all those who aided and abetted your crime with compliance and/or countenance.
Your failure to cooperate is costing the govemment mid taxpavers  large sums  in investigative fees.
YOU HAVE SHOWN NO REMORSE whatsoever.
Even at this time, any statement by you which would help the investigation  in monetary recovery  for the victims would be most beneficial.

This letter is a plea for true JUSTICE.

It asks for the MAXIMUM SENTENTENCE under the law.

Respectfully yours,

Phyllis Lerner

Fascinating case of Clark Rockefeller, erstwhile German citizen Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter.

The man with the eccentric accent, the tantalizing hints of family fortune and the impressive conversational knowledge of everything from physics to art to the stock market is actually Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, who grew up in Germany, came to the United States as a teenage exchange student and never left, not even contacting his family back home for the last 20 years.

More information

• Long feature on Gerhartsreiter, in Vanity Fair, 2009
• How impostors like Clark Rockefeller capture our trust (187.81 kB)
  from Boston.com
  
• Video news report from 2008, NECN

Literature of lying: the cover is blown on yet another tall story – Features, Books – Independent.co.uk

So what drives people to invent entire histories for themselves? One thought is that they are mentally deranged, like Anna Anderson, a German woman who spent most of her life masquerading as Grand Duchess Anastasia, daughter of the last Tsar of Russia, until she was interned in an asylum. 

Another possibility is that they are coldly in it for the money, because there is serious money to be made from fake memoirs. Defonseca, for example, successfully sued her publishers for $22.5m (£11m)in unpaid royalties, a judgment that was upheld by a Boston court as recently as 2005, before her exposure.

But Oliver James, the psychologist, believes that Margaret Seltzer and others like her are not mad, but neither should they be thought of as con artists who lie for the cold-blooded purpose of cheating others out of money.

“I suppose most hard-headed readers of The Independent will say, ‘Oh come on, she was in it for the money’ but actually I think it’s more complicated than that. I don’t think anybody has gone to those lengths purely for money. When Heather Mills pretended to be somebody else, she wasn’t doing it for money,” he says.

“At one extreme, you have schizophrenics, who have no sense of their own self and may really believe they are somebody else. At the opposite end of the scale, you have someone like Tony Blackburn who, when I interviewed him, said he wished his whole life could be a radio broadcast because he feels most real when he is being a radio personality.

“Somewhere along that scale you have people who have a weak sense of self and only feel real when they are pretending to be someone else.”

And, judging by the way these people react when caught out, it often seems that, in a parallel world of their own making, their invented stories are somehow true. Poor Binjamin Wilkomirski had a complete breakdown when he was exposed as a sham, as if life as an abandoned Swiss orphan had no meaning for him. Helen Darville, by contrast, has found another outlet for her talent for telling a convincing story, by retraining as a lawyer.

Margaret Seltzer insisted she had meant no harm, and believed her attempted deception might do some good for people she had known in Los Angeles who did come from gangland backgrounds. “I was in a position where people said, ‘you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk’,” she said. “Maybe it’s an ego thing – I don’t know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it.”

Whatever her intention, she wasted three years on a book that is never going to sell and has brought her public humiliation.

An interesting NY Times article on the tightly knit Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn. Among their number, Eddie Antar aka Crazy Eddie – the name familiar to me from trips to Wantagh, Long Island when his stores were advertised everywhere.

For many years, the most famous SY in the world was Eddie Antar, known professionally as Crazy Eddie. In the ’70s, he revolutionized the home electronics business and created an empire.

Nobody did retail theater better than Crazy Eddie. His souk-smart salesmen — many of them relatives and friends from the enclave — choreographed the shopping experience, waltzing the zboon (SY slang for “customer”) in well-rehearsed steps toward the be’aah, the sale. His ads (“His prices are insane!”) were commercial performance art. And when he was caught defrauding his investors for almost $100 million dollars and subsequently fled to Israel, Eddie provided an international drama that ended in extradition and prison.

The Crazy Eddie case became a cause célèbre, shattering longstanding community rules of silence and decorum. Eddie’s J-Dub wife, Debbie, caught him in flagrante delicto with his mistress, who also happened to be a J-Dub named Debbie, on the last day of December 1983 — a confrontation remembered among old-timers as the New Year’s Eve massacre. The massacre was a real bean-spiller, and it was followed by the testimony of Eddie’s first cousin (and partner and C.F.O.) Sam E. Antar on how the illegal schemes had been carried out. This gave the United States Attorney prosecuting the case, Michael Chertoff (now the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security), more than enough to work with. Eddie went away for six years.

The souk smart phrase above reminds me of 2 Danish guys I knew in Fort Lauderdale back in 1994/5. They both worked at Florida Swap Shop selling electronic goods. They were clean cut, nordic, young fellows and I remember them reporting that their Israeli boss had remarked:

‘If I looked like you, or you could sell like me, now that would be a winning combination!’.

An interesting blog post from Sam Antar – Eddie’s cousin and former CFO of Crazy Eddie’s. Something to read before going shopping on Tottenham Court Road – or 5th Ave.