Sympathy for the Fraudster

I had written a post more than a year ago when Bernie Madoff went from being an obscure wealth manager to a notorious swindler whose pyramid scheme ruined scores of lives, decimating retirement accounts and lifetime savings of victims. When it was revealed that the charade had done little but provide Madoff a lifetime of opulent living and had bilked his victims out of their money, there was understandable rage towards a man who had lived on the hog at the expense of others.

The constant refrain when Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison - essentially a life sentence for the 72-year old man - the constant refrain was that the penalty wasn't enough. How could life in a minimum security prison possibly serve as restitution for the lives that he had shattered, forcing hopeful retirees back to the workforce or to live with relatives, even driving one man to commit suicide upon realizing that his entire life savings had been wiped out.

Somehow, this past weekend's news about the suicide of his son, Mark, has somewhat quieted those voices, and fairly so. Insomuch that it's true that there is no greater punishment to see your loved ones suffer, I'm not sure if there's anything worse than to know that your own son's blood is on your hands - that your misdeeds have marginalized, shamed and terrified your son to the point that he would hang himself with a dog leash with your 2-year old grandson sleeping in the room next door. Even the most embittered and vindictive victim of the Ponzi scheme would find no satisfaction in such punishment. In fact, most have spoken up lamenting Mark's suicide, noting that while it doesn't at all bring back the funds squandered, it simply adds more victims to the crime, such as a son who will now grow up without a father. In the loneliness of his jail cell, what can Bernie Madoff be thinking besides: It wasn't worth it. Of if I could only take it all back.

I can't help but see a deeper message here about the toxicity of sin. Whether it's a massive Ponzi scheme or my own pride - there's something about sin that tends to aggressively take out more and more victims beyond what the eye can see or the mind can conceive. The short-term gratification is exactly that - short-term, and the negative ramifications tend to linger and spread in unexpected places. And like Bernie Madoff, our own misdeeds probably beg the rhetorical question in retrospect: was it worth it?