Renowned investigative journalist Richard Behar delivers the definitive account of history’s
largest—and longest-running—financial fraud “the scale of the deception…beggars belief” ( New
York Post ). 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 conman. 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.
