I'd heard this guy's name in the news from time to time during the financial crisis, and as a point of reference by political commentators I follow since, but I'd never looked into exactly who he was and the substance of what he did wrong. Joe Berlinger, who has taken a sea change from creating high-profile serial killer documentaries for Netflix, has put together a slow-burning, ultimately enthralling overview of Madoff as a person and the crimes he committed. In addition to a lot of entertaining, colourful commentary provided by a range of interested parties (including biographers, FBI agents, former employees and a mathematician who can hold a grudge), Berlinger also does a solid job of making Madoff's crime's comprehensible to the layman. There is something intrinsically satisfying about this: genuine educational content that strips away layers of artificially-imposed complexity and reveals the simple truth about a broad abuse of power.
The con itself was actually just a very simple Ponzi scheme - Madoff always ran a legitimate business, but from early on would take on unofficial consultations for private investment portfolios. At one point, he simply stopped investing the money, and kept it for himself. At its peak, this led to Madoff managing billions of dollars belonging to clients from a broad range of backgrounds. When occasionally pressed for proof of financial transactions and investments, he would get people who worked for him to forge evidence. Most of the time, however, he leveraged his own prestige to attract clients and the associated exclusivity of his portfolio to ward off scrutiny. In one particularly damning example of this kind of manipulation, Madoff essentially took one of the few country clubs in Palm Beach, Florida that was open to Jews in the 1960s and '70s. (One interviewee entertainingly notes that success in Wall Street is measured by one's ability to spend half the year playing golf in Florida. He didn't mention Trump and he didn't need to.) In turn, he cultivated a sense of trust amongst its members in a place and time where they couldn't trust many others, and exploited that to get clients and enhance his own exclusivity. If you asked questions you were out. He used his personal magnetism to avoid serious scrutiny at various other points, at one point boldly making himself available, sans any team of lawyers, to a group of young forensic accountants appointed to audit his company by a regulatory agency, as the sole point of contact. This apparently had the effect of scaring them off from finding any serious indiscretions, though his prominence in said regulatory agencies and his ability to rub shoulders with their directors probably played a role as well.
The aforementioned admixture of personalities, both those profiled and those interviewed, adds a layer of richness to the documentary's proceedings. One highlight that stands out in my mind is the FBI agent who first approached Madoff's office and fancied himself an amateur art critic - the Lichtenstein prints of a bull by his desk, ostensibly referring to a bull market, he confidently describes as symbolic for 'bullshit,' and a large sculpture of a screw by the window means 'screw you.' This same guy channels another Bernie at the series's finish and unequivocally denounces the lack of consequences for the banks and other Wall Street institutions that profited from Madoff's ponzi scheme as unfair, as do most of the other interviewees. A Madoff biographer guides the series along with an impressive amount of detail about the man, from a surprisingly sympathetic perspective, but without losing sight of the seriousness of his failings. Harry Markopolos, a religiously committed nerdy forensic accountant and mathematician, discovered Madoff's ponzi scheme early on and pressed the regulatory agencies to do something about it for more than a decade, and remains bitter about the lack of accountability after finally been proven right. The unfiltered honesty of Markopolos and others interviewed, and the unvarnished honesty of the documentary's conclusion about the ecosystem that facilitated Madoff's crimes, makes the series watching in and of itself.
Some elements do not work particularly well, but I'm willing to be lenient given the number of terrible documentaries I've seen recently that do the same thing but worse. All re-enactments for documentaries are terrible, but there now seems to be an expectation that they have them, and the ones produced for Madoff aren't as bad as they could have been. The silent, slow-motion shots of Madoff waltzing through his main floor on the Lipstick Building in Manhattan, magnanimous and supercilious, cigar firmly suckled, make the much more interesting real world feel sterile and Hollywood. The chosen actors look more like actors than real people, and ultimately less interesting, though with some interesting quirks of their own that don't quite fit. Joseph Scotto's sparkling white hairpiece, for instance, is much like an abstract sculpture you might find in the lobby of an office building in Manhattan. As Madoff gets older, it grows, in turn, more buoyant and luminescent. It looks like a unicorn's tail. Scotto is an odd choice to play Madoff - playing the man as though he's the lead in a biopic and, a la Al Pacino, seems to have decided to use the opportunity as an excuse to play to his own eccentricities and beats as an actor in lieu of truth to life. His Alan Rickman-esque acerbic self-possession and smugness doesn't quite match up with the Madoff we see in documentary footage, who came across as more charismatic, more gregariousness, his long-term con maintained behind a convincing, more personable veneer. If this was a movie about Madoff and Scotto walked into the frame I would immediately know he's the bad guy. If I was investing twenty million dollars in some behind-the-counter portfolio and this guy greeted me at the door of his office I would turn and run. And in reality that obviously wasn't what happened. People seemed to genuinely like Madoff - many of the investors and employees interviewed made efforts to separate the man himself from the crimes he committed, unable or unwilling to fully reconcile the two.
On the balance, however, Madoff was surprisingly entertaining - and insightful. Berlinger could have done more, and there's clearly a much broader world of corruption, which facilitated Madoff's ascension and took care of him until 2008, that isn't deal with by the series, but what it sets its eyes to is interesting enough to be worth a look.
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