The Biggest Lie: Bernie Madoff

On the morning of Thursday the 11th of December 2008, two FBI agents knocked on the door of a penthouse apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side. The man who answered the door was 70 years old, silver-haired, and one of the most respected figures on Wall Street. His name was Bernard Lawrence Madoff. He had served as chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange. He had advised the Securities and Exchange Commission on trading regulation. He ran an investment firm that managed money for celebrities, royalty, universities, and Holocaust survivors' foundations. When the FBI agents asked whether there was an innocent explanation for what he was about to be asked, Madoff replied: there is no innocent explanation. Over the previous 17 years, and possibly longer, he had operated the largest Ponzi scheme in the history of the world. It had defrauded his clients of approximately $65 billion. It had wiped out charities. It had bankrupted pension funds. It had led to at least two of his victims taking their own lives, and it would eventually lead to the death of his own son. The story of how one man, sitting behind a desk on the 17th floor of a Manhattan office block, fabricated 17 years of financial statements from nothing, and how the entire American financial regulatory system failed to catch him despite being told, in writing, exactly what he was doing.

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