The Madoff Chronicles: Inside the Secret World of Bernie and Ruth

by Brian Ross

Book Overview

The collapse of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme led to the instant evaporation of $65 billion of wealth. The effects of Madoff's brazen fraud were felt most closely in New York and Palm Beach but the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 140131029X
• ISBN13: 9781401310295
• Release Date: September 2009
• Publisher: Voice
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.5"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Great read!!!

Wow. This book was great. I couldn't put it down! It does a really great job at explaining the situation, as well as offering many different perspectives of the story. I loved it. I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves good books!

Very good read

Gives you the details you want without bogging you down, especially good if you have only a casual interest and want to know the latest. Well written.

Madoff...so aptly named

When I was growing up in Greenwich, Connecticut, our neighbors all seemed to have hedges and stone walls. Now some of them have hedge funds and are stonily silent about Bernie Madoff. It's hard to tell how many people in this town have been ruined by Madoff's Ponzi scheme, but I'll bet there are plenty. Brian Ross's "The Madoff Chronicles" is a good first look at how things went wrong. Madoff, himself, wondered why he hadn't been caught earlier...a point about which the author sounds as bewildered as any reader of his book... but Ross also lays blame on those who should have been more vigilant. The SEC, for instance, was conned and seduced by Madoff more than once, as was one of his biggest "feeders", the Fairfield Greenwich Group. Ross often seems to ask more questions than he answers but this decades-old crime is still unfolding and a follow-up book should be in order. He offers a crisp narrative and is good at explaining the relationships of those around Bernie Madoff. I was fascinated by the whole seventeenth/nineteenth floor set-up and how, for the most part, one hand really didn't appear to know what the other hand was doing. There are some fascinating paragraphs about how Madoff's personality allowed this scheme to continue for decades and one comes away from this book with a pretty clear understanding of the players and their connections with each other. I highly recommend "The Madoff Chronicles" and compliment Brian Ross for his investigative work. One wonders how many other Ponzis are out there now and how much more vigilant those who can stop these things from happening again have learned from the Bernie Madoff years.

interesting

i just finished this last night and it was pretty good reading. Just enough information to let you know you know what he did without a long drag out explanation.. I recomend it ..

Thus far, the best book about the Madoff Ponzi scheme

This informative and interesting book includes interviews with a number of people who worked for Bernie Madoff, in particular a chapter devoted exclusively to an interview with Madoff's long-time secretary that's pretty much a tell-all about Madoff and some of the staff. So many people lost money when they "invested" their funds with Madoff that it is amazing that they and the SEC just ignored the signs of the fraud. The investors and the SEC just did not dig deeply enough to figure out what was gong on. Perhaps they just didn't want to. Seems many members of the SEC were just too close to Madoff. I thought I had read pretty much about the fraud, but while reading this book, the Kindle edition, I realized there was much that I had not known. I was surprised that there were drugs involved, particularly marijuana use by Bernie and his wife Ruth. Bernie used to send his messenger to Spanish Harlem to purchase marijuana, and apparently Ruth Madoff was becoming a serious user of the product. The book is extremely well written, and I found it hard to put down once I began reading it. I ended up asking how this all could have happened. I'm not an investor, but I read the financial news, thought the SEC could be trusted to follow through as required and do the job of protecting investors. But they failed! The investigator Harry Markopolos was on target when he testified to congress about the Madoff fraud and stated that the SEC wouldn't be able to find ice cream in a Dairy Queen nor steak in an Outback steak restaurant. I HIGHLY recommend this book and would have given it ten stars were they available.