Fifteen years after Bernie Madoff’s arrest renowned investigative journalist Richard Behar
delivers the definitive account of history’s largest—and longest-running—financial fraud.
Some $68 billion evaporated during Bernie Madoff’s epic confidence game. Two people were driven
to suicide in the wake of the Ponzi Scheme’s exposure. Others went to prison. But there has
never been a satisfying accounting for how Bernie got away with so much for so long. Until
now. Richard Behar’s relationship with Madoff began in 2011 with a simple email request from
the inmate. By the time Madoff died in 2021 he had sent Behar more than 300 emails and dozens
of handwritten letters participated in some fifty phone conversations and sat for three
in-person jailhouse interviews—a level of access provided to no other reporter. Behar also
established relationships with hundreds of regulators prosecutors FBI agents investors Wall
Street experts ex-employees of Madoff’s family members school classmates and others. The
result is the final word on the criminal behind history’s most enduring fraud—and on those who
believed him covered for him or locked him up. Behar illuminates not only the fraud’s
origins—decades earlier than Madoff claimed in his confession—but also the complicity of
investors Wall Street insiders family members and some of the largest banks in the US and
Europe. Shocking infuriating riveting (and at times absurdly funny) Madoff shows us how
Bernie ensnared thousands of investors. As Behar’s dogged reporting over the last fifteen years
makes clear however there aren’t many innocents left standing by the end of this tale. Just
about everyone involved is guilty at a minimum of humanity’s most consistent weakness: greed.
