“Everyone was greedy. I just went along."

The Wizard of Lies REVIEW

First of all, the resemblance between Robert De Niro and Bernie Madoff is a bit spooky.

https://nyppagesix.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/madoff.jpg?quality=90&strip=all

It is impossible for me to say how well De Niro pulls off Bernie Madoff’s personality though. I suspect that Bernie Madoff is one of those people who cannot be imitated by anyone else precisely. For 40 years, Madoff built a reputation of honesty and integrity that was accentuated with a profound understanding of his chosen field (finance). Bernie Madoff had the capacity to make up a complicated lie and carry on a long conversation about it, for years, with people who knew him. Someone has described him as an idiot savant with respect to image projection (like Shakespeare’s Iago). His thoughts about his scam are revealing for what they say about the human capacity of rationalization. Madoff seems to walk fluidly back and forth between taking responsibility and projecting it.

Here, he seems to take responsibility: “[My wife] is angry at me. I mean, you know, I destroyed our family.”

Here he casts some doubt upon whether his actions were entirely his own: “How could I have done this? I was making a lot of money. I didn’t need the money. [Am I] a flawed character?”

Here he deflects criticisms of hi essential nature by distancing himself from the decisions he made from the sort of person he is: “I’m not the kind of person I’m being portrayed as.”

Here, he reframes his scam in a way that makes him seem like an altruist: “I made a lot of money for my clients”

Here he insulates his fraud from the realm of decision making. Somehow, he seems to want to present himself as someone else’s puppet. His actions are not entirely autonomous:  “We made a very nice living. I didn’t need the investment-advisory business. I took it on and got myself involved in it, but if you think I woke up one morning and said, ‘Well, listen, I need to be able to buy a boat and a plane, and this is what I’m going to do,’ that’s wrong.”

Here, he makes it sound as though the original idea for his fraud was not concocted by him (but if not him, then who?) He makes it seem as though he was trying to be good. He was trying to end the scam. He was a “hostage” of sorts: “I had more than enough money to support my lifestyle and my family’s lifestyle. I allowed myself to be talked into something, and that’s my fault. I thought I could extricate myself after a short period of time. But I just couldn’t.”

Here, he complains of unfairness in the way that he is presented in the media. He suggests that what he is, is what he was when he was at his best. Not what he was when he was at his worst: “Does anybody want to hear that I had a successful business and did all these wonderful things for the industry? And got all these awards? And so did my family? I did all of this during the legitimate years. No. You don’t read any of that.”

Here, he deflects blame onto the wider system, the context: “I realized from a very early stage that the [financial & investment] market is a whole rigged job. There’s no chance that investors have in this market.”

Here, he portrays himself as a victim, asking to be seen as a fellow victim and not the perpetrator: “[The fraud] was a nightmare for me. It was only a nightmare for me. It’s horrible. When I say nightmare, imagine carrying this secret. Look, imagine going home every night not being able to tell your wife, living with this ax over your head, not telling your sons, my brother, seeing them every day in the business and not being able to confide in them.”

Here, he asserts the pain of not being understood. Not being able to explain (as though there is an explanation for defrauding people of 65 billion dollars: “My wife doesn’t forgive me, but at least she understood. With my sons I could never explain what happened.”

Here, he insists that he tried to warn people. He put warnings on the cigarette boxes as it were and notified people that they should not invest money with him if they could not afford to lose it all:  “[Prospective investors] were all told by me, ‘Don’t invest any more money than you could afford to lose. This is the stock market. There’s always stuff that can happen. Brokerage firms can fail. I could go crazy and do something stupid. If you want a [safe thing], put your money in government bonds. So everybody understood this.”

Here, he infers that he was just one more leaf in the stream, responding to peer pressures that he was not alone in responding to: “Everyone was greedy. I just went along. It’s not an excuse.” Look, there was complicity, in my view.”

Here, he decries that his actions were in no way more reprehensible than what the government itself does (perhaps he is referring to Social security?): “It’s unbelievable. Goldman … no one has any criminal convictions—the whole new regulatory reform is a joke. The whole government is a Ponzi scheme.”

Here, he both takes responsibility and dismisses it in the same paragraph: “Look, none of my clients, even if they lost every penny they put in there, can plead poverty. Look, it doesn’t mean I’m excusing what I did, doesn’t mean I don’t feel sorry for them. I’m embarrassed … It was the people that came in very late in the game that got hurt. All of my friends, most of my individual clients, are not net losers. Now if you listen to [them], they’re living out of Dumpsters and they don’t have any money, and I’m sure it’s a traumatic experience to some, but I made a lot of money for people. Does it justify it? No.”

Here he tries to extricate himself from guilt by saying that he tried to make things right for those he regarded as friends. “I was always able to rationalize [the fraud]… Look, I tried to give moneys back to my individual clients when I realized it was impossible to get myself out. I tried to return funds to my friends, moneys to the smaller clients. They wouldn’t take it back … Everybody said, ‘No, you can’t do that. You can’t send me my money back. I’ve been a friend of yours, or a client, for years’ … I couldn’t tell them I would have been doing them a favor. I couldn’t. I mean, could I have insisted? Yes.”

Here, we see him taking responsibility and not taking responsibility: “I did block [my fraud] out of my mind. I had no choice.”

Here, we see him placing his own suffering on the scale as a down payment for assuaging his responsibility for inflicting harm on others: “Let me tell you, I cried for well over two weeks [over the suicide death of my son Mark]. I cried and cried. I didn’t come out of my room. I didn’t speak to anybody, and so on. I have tears in my eyes when I’m talking to you, even. Not a day goes by that I don’t suffer. I may sound okay on the phone. Trust me, I’m not okay. And never will be.”

http://www.ibtimes.com/select-quotes-bernard-madoff-magazine-interview-271615 

Question for Comment: Are our actions ever entirely our responsibility? Are they ever entirely not our responsibility? The wizard of Lies raises all these questions and more.