He finds a grim humor in Madoff’s widow, Ruth, whose stage of complicity stays undetermined. Behar interviews the lawyer who’s making an attempt, thus far futilely, to return to her the canopied marital mattress — “shorter than a queen” — and quotes the hard-boiled F.B.I. agent who chides her for smoking. “Ruth, that’s gonna kill you,” he says. “If solely,” she replies.
“No surprise Bernie doesn’t thoughts jail,” the agent says later. “She gained’t shut the [bleep] up.”
Maybe most provocatively, Behar takes chapter-long difficulty with the characterization of Madoff’s wiped-out purchasers as “victims,” preferring the time period “losers.” In spite of everything, he writes, “these poor unfortunates had been pulling in huge, impossibly constant earnings and not using a peep — typically for many years.”
He’s proper that buyers ought to conduct due diligence. However there’s a bizarre unacknowledged echo with one in every of Donald J. Trump’s favourite disparagements that makes Behar’s personal, late-in-the-narrative try to yoke collectively Madoff and the previous president as avatars of a nationwide mental-health disaster appear shallow.
In a big crowd that features accountants, key punch operators, secretaries, merchants, turncoats, quants, S.E.C. officers, attorneys, court docket officers and the expensive departed Aunt Adele — who labored with neuroscientists and requires a forensic examination of the warped folds of Bernie’s mind — the psychiatrist Behar consults looks like a last-minute and considerably awkward invitee.
Even with numerous quirks and jerks, although, “Madoff: The Last Phrase” boils a narrative of mythic proportions all the way down to a bowlful of golden nuggets. If that is the primary time you’re being served, a lot the higher.
MADOFF: The Last Phrase | By Richard Behar | Avid Reader Press | 384 pp. | $35
