How Bernie Madoff Became the Monster of Wall Street

Factual America

12 Jan

Written By

No one knows when Bernie Madoff created the Ponzi scheme that would one day lose $64 billion and ruin many lives. Madoff said it started late on. In this episode of Factual America, Joe Berlinger, director and executive producer of Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street, tells host, Matthew Sherwood, that he thinks it was right at the start of Madoff’s career, after he lost $30,000 of investors’ money and, upon receiving a loan to pay it back, chose to lie about what had happened rather than admit the truth.

Whatever the answer, Madoff did not act alone. Others helped him, both actively and – in the case of regulators and banks – through their negligence. Year after year, Madoff’s investments remained profitable despite this being financially impossible. He got away with it though, because, as Joe tells Matthew, ‘people just look the other way when greed is involved.’

In the end, it took a ‘Black Swan’ event – the 2008 financial crisis – to bring Madoff’s sham success to a cataclysmic end.

With his own longstanding interest in stock markets and thirty years experience as a documentary filmmaker, Joe Berlinger is the ideal man to tell the story of Bernie Madoff’s rise and fall. As well as discussing Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, Joe and Matthew look at how what happened with Madoff finds an echo today with the unfolding FTX scandal. They also discuss whether or not Joe worries about standing out from other filmmakers, and the struggle he had to distribute his first film, Brother’s Keeper, in 1992.

“I wanted to dissect the Ponzi and how it worked, and what all those red flags were and why it's representative of such incompetence, or worse, on the part of a lot of institutions that should have known better...I wanted people to understand just how easy it is to manipulate and cheat the system in part as a cautionary tale.” – Joe Berlinger

Time Stamps

00:00 – Introducing this episode’s guest, Joe Berlinger
01:33 – How to pronounce Bernie Madoff’s name
01:44 – Joe gives a brief outline of his docu-series, Bernie Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street
04:32 – How Bernie Madoff used other people’s greed to fund his Ponzi scheme
07:29 – How Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme eventually collapsed
11:47 – A warning about Wall Street: It is not your friend
14:17 – Why Joe wanted to make Bernie Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street
17:49 – What makes Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme different from others
18:55 – The irony that Madoff didn’t need to commit fraud in order to obtain more money
19:41 – On Bernie Madoff’s life defining decision: to be a liar rather than a failure
25:23 – How Joe’s lifelong interest in the stock market helped him make Bernie Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street
29:37 – Joe discusses whether or not he pays attention to other filmmakers and Brother’s Keeper, his first film

Resources:

MADOFF: The Monster of Wall Street
MovieMaker Magazine
Innersound Audio
Alamo Pictures

Transcript for Factual America Episode 119: MADOFF: The Monster of Wall Street

Matthew Sherwood 00:00
This is Factual America. I'm your host, Matthew Sherwood. Each week, I watch a hit documentary, and then talk with the filmmakers and their subjects. Bernie Madoff had it all. A successful career on Wall Street. The All American family along with wealth and fame. But from the very beginning, he risked it all by running what became the world's biggest Ponzi scheme, in the process, destroying many people's lives, including his own. Join me as I discuss Bernie Madoff with Oscar nominated and two time Emmy winning filmmaker and documentary pioneer, Joe Berlinger, executive producer and director of the new Netflix docu-series Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street. Along the way, we pick up some investing tips, learn how to properly pronounce Bernie Madoff's name, and how to make a film about financial fraud sexy. Stay tuned. Joe Berlinger, welcome to Factual America. How are things with you?

Joe Berlinger 00:53
Very good, thanks. Looking forward to the end of the year!

Matthew Sherwood 00:58
I think we all are. Just to remind our listeners and viewers that we're talking about the film Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street. It's a new Netflix docu-series premiering on January 4. So, welcome again, Joe. It's an honor to have you on, and maybe you can get us started since no one's had a chance to see this yet, except myself and a few other lucky people out there. What is Madoff [mad-off]: The Monster of Wall Street all about? It's got a good Netflix title, kind of says it all in a way, but maybe you can give us a synopsis of...

Joe Berlinger 01:33
It's actually - I would call it Madoff [maid-off]: The Monster of Wall Street because it's Bernie Madoff [maid-off], although some people do call him Bernie Madoff [mad-off]. But I would say it's Bernie Madoff [maid-off]!

Matthew Sherwood 01:44
Okay.

Joe Berlinger 01:44
But it's a deep dive into the world's largest Ponzi scheme that happened in 2008. Bernie Madoff stole 64 billion dollars. And people don't really fully understand the story, and I wanted to take it on. I'm kind of am known for the true crime thing, and I've come off of a whole series of serial killer shows about Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy, etc. And, you know, those take their emotional toll, and I wanted to focus on a financial serial killer this time because that's what I think of Bernie. Bernie is a financial serial killer. The level of destruction on people's lives was horrendous. And they're actually really, you know, there's, of course, a couple of great scripted dramas, most notably the Wizard of Lies that was on HBO, that covered the story. But there hasn't really been a deep dive dissecting the actual Ponzi scheme, the way I think we do in the show, and more importantly, people who know the story of Bernie Madoff and the historic largest Ponzi scheme in history, 64 billion dollars, somehow, the story has morphed into this idea that this guy was this incredible evil genius who single handedly scammed people out of that much money, but what the doc series really goes into, I think, for the first time, is just the level of co-conspirators and level of ineptitude and malfeasance on Wall Street that allowed him to flourish for so long. And it just seemed like - you know, I couldn't imagine that the show would be coming out around the time of yet another financial fraud, the FTX scandal with Sam Bankman-Fried, but it's interesting that this has happened because as the Bernie Madoff show demonstrates, people just look the other way when greed is involved.

Matthew Sherwood 04:07
Yeah. I mean, so since - I think that's excellent, because it answers all those questions: Why make this now? What is it that we're going to see that wasn't already shown in the past or at least covered in the news media. I mean, who - so, who got rich besides Madoff, and maybe his family, and closest conspirators? It's a wider web, as you point out in the series.

Joe Berlinger 04:32
Yeah. I mean, certainly all the hedge funds, and there were about seventy in the United States and two hundred outside of the United States. In fact, the fraud was bigger outside of the United States, meaning European money coming in to Bernie's hedge fund. There was a lot of institutions that were making a lot of money on him, and one of the reasons, and one of the great red flags, is the way it worked, and the way the hedge fund industry worked, is that there were this thing called feeder funds, you know. Hedge funds would collect money from investors and pool it together, and then send it to Bernie as the money manager to invest in what they thought was his, you know, incredibly successful fund. What they didn't know is it was all a Ponzi scheme. But the lack of due diligence on the part of these hedge funds was incredible. They all looked the other way, because Bernie offered them that they could keep all the fees themselves. Normally, when a feeder fund sends money to Bernie to invest or to any hedge fund to invest, they split all the fees, and the fees are quite rich, it's the two and twenty rule. You know, normally a hedge fund would, you know, keeps 2% of the assets, so, if there's a million dollars, they keep 2% of that, and it's a lot more than a million dollars, and if the million dollars then grows to two million dollars, they get 20% of that increase. Normally, that's split between the feeder fund and the investing hedge fund. But Bernie said to the people bringing him the money, You keep all the fees, you know, don't worry about it, I'll just make money on the trades. And not to get too technical here, but the money on trades is a very thin margin. The real money is keeping a percentage of the assets and keeping 20% of the profits. And he let everyone keep that money. So, hard questions weren't asked by all the investment - all the pooled funds that invested into Madoff, you know - basic questions, you know, about the viability of the fund. So, you know, we saw, you know, greed in operation here.

Matthew Sherwood 07:07
I mean, that's really what it gets down to, isn't it? Just in many ways, just pure greed, because, I mean, I think you have one person on camera, but talking about his own father, really, but says if it's too good to be true then it is. I mean, here you have all these - everyone says this is too good to be true, but they carry on feeding funds to him, and look the other way.

Joe Berlinger 07:29
Totally. I mean, and that's a basic rule that I hope all [our] viewers will take away from this. If something looks too good to be true, it probably is. Bernie reported that, you know, 96.4% of the time he was profitable, you know, that's just not how finance works. You know, you have good years and bad years. But nobody is consistently profitable. That was a major red flag. I mean, all sorts of red flags. He was using a conservative options strategy called the split strike conversion strategy, which I won't bore you, unless you want me to, to explain it. But it's actually a very conservative strategy. And yet he was using this conservative strategy to make outsized gains, and nobody questioned that and most glaringly, because it's an options strategy. Options are derivatives of stocks, the size of his fund would have dictated that if he's using these options, he would have to be using more options than are actually in existence. And that should have been a red flag. And then there was the institutional or regulatory ineptitude. I mean, there's one particular character in the show named Harry Markopolos, who was - well, now he's a fraud investigator, but at the time he worked for a competitive hedge fund, he's a mathematician. And his job was to try to create products to market, and he took a look at the marketing materials for Bernie's hedge fund and thought, within four minutes, that this doesn't feel right, that there's no way that these kinds of profits can be made with this strategy, and called a hedge fund - called it a Ponzi scheme within, you know, the first five minutes of analyzing the numbers, and then took it upon himself to go to the SEC, not once but a dozen times, pointing out all the problems, and the SEC just ignored it. Repeatedly. I mean, that's the thing about - the most remarkable thing about this story is that it's, you know, government regulators, whistleblowers, none of that brought Bernie down. What brought Bernie down was a once in a lifetime Black Swan event, which was the financial crisis of 2008. You know, the mortgage market meltdown caused all hedge funds and many investors, they wanted to get out of anything they were invested in, and stockpile cash. That's what happens in a massive meltdown, the likes of which we hadn't seen since the Great Depression, in 2008. And it was only because people were calling in their chips, because of an other situation, the mortgage meltdown, that people called in, to redeem their money that Bernie got caught with his pants down, because a Ponzi scheme by definition is you bring new investor money in to pay off old investors, because in fact, you're not doing any investing, you're just sitting on cash and using it for your own purposes, and if you have more new investors putting money in, than old investors cashing out, you know, or redeeming some or all of their money, which is normal, you know, you're a fund, and some people come in, and some people come out, and that's the name of the game. But if you have more people taking their money out than are putting their money in, then the scheme collapses. And that's what happened as a result of the mortgage meltdown of 2008.

Matthew Sherwood 11:40
And that mortgage meltdown was also a product of lack of regulatory oversight or proper regulation. So, I mean...

Joe Berlinger 11:47
Absolutely. I mean, that's the thing. I hope people understand that you have to take control of your own money. And you have to truly understand that Wall Street is a for profit business. They're not here to be your friend, or to put their arm around you and take care of you, and, you know, all these commercials that talk about, you know, your wonderful retirement, and we're gonna get you there, they're not there as an advisor, or friend, they're there to make money off you, and most people do it legitimately. But there's a lot of greed, and, you know, funky stuff that goes on. And you just, you know, obviously, if you've got your - you know, I trust Charles Schwab or Fidelity - you know, the big institutions that have your money, you know, I think all do a really good job of doing the right thing, but it's anything that seems a little different, people need to be wary of, because often it's fraud. And ironically, we've seen it just happen again with FTX. And, you know, and the similarities are pretty stark, you know, you have an outside entity, you know, somebody with, you know, these sophisticated investors, taking money from other people, giving it to FTX without any oversight. And Sam Bankman-Fried was taking that money and using it to shore up his hedge fund. And the whole thing came tumbling down. Now, it wasn't, you know, what he was doing wasn't really a Ponzi scheme. But the similarity about something seeming too good to be true, eliciting the emotion of greed in people, and saying, Okay, it may be too good to be true, but I won't ask too any questions because this is really good for me. Instead of it raising that issue of, Gee, this is, this doesn't seem right, let me look into it. It's like, Okay, this doesn't seem right, but I'm making money off it. So, I'm not going to ask any questions, you know.

Matthew Sherwood 13:44
And Sam Bankman-Fried was just, it seems almost destined to happen, because we do not, as a society, learn any lessons, and it's happening ever more frequently, in many ways.

Joe Berlinger 13:55
No, it's - well, there's a financial crisis every five to eight years, and there's many Ponzi schemes and frauds that happen routinely. I mean, it's, you know.

Matthew Sherwood 14:08
It sounds like you have a Sam Bankman-Fried doc in your future.

Joe Berlinger 14:15
I think it's been so heavily covered. And...

Matthew Sherwood 14:17
Yeah.

Joe Berlinger 14:17
You know, one of the reasons I wanted to do the Madoff show is because I don't think people really understand just how simple the Ponzi was, which makes it so extraordinary that it went on for so long. And again, you know, people think, Oh, Bernie was this fraudulent guy. No, there was a lot of co-conspirators. Multiple hedge funds that should have known better, JP Morgan Chase - you know, the Ponzi scheme was - all that money in and out - was one bank account called the famous 703 Account, which is the last three numbers of the bank account was 703, so it's called the 703 Account, but normally, when you have billions of dollars going in and out of a checking account, any transaction that's suspicious that's over 10,000 dollars usually generates what's called a suspicious activity report. You know, it is a fundamental tenet of banking, you need to know your customer, and they should be monitoring. And the reason the transactions looked funky was there was no counterparty. It was just money moving back and forth between entities and very large, you know, within Bernie's sphere, and it should have raised some red flags.

Matthew Sherwood 15:38
I mean, my bank gets in touch with me if I go to a different part of the country and spend a little bit more than I usually do, you know, or, you know-!

Joe Berlinger 15:48
I can tell you if - and that account had billions and billions of dollars flowing through it. And I can tell you if that bank account was - you know, if the business behind that bank account was in Mexico, they would assume it was, you know, or would be suspicious about drug cartel money or something like that, and it would have generated suspicious activity reports. Now, I can't say that I feel Chase knew there was a Ponzi scheme. But all the mechanisms in place to do the normal due diligence, were cast aside because it was too profitable to have billions of dollars in cash flowing through your bank - is my opinion.

Matthew Sherwood 16:36
I want to get actually get back to the point about the simplicity of his Ponzi scheme, but we'll give our listeners a quick break. We'll be right back with Joe Berlinger, exec. producer and director of the new Netflix docu-series Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street, streaming on Netflix from January 4.

Factual America Midroll 16:55
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Matthew Sherwood 17:16
Welcome back to Factual America. I'm here with award winning filmmaker, Joe Berlinger, executive producer and director of the new Netflix docu-series, Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street, streaming on Netflix from January 4. We're talking about Bernie Madoff and his Ponzi scheme, which you've defined what a Ponzi scheme extremely well to our listeners, but just put it in even more stark terms, he didn't invest a dime, right? I mean, it's not a single dime of it got invested anywhere, except in his pocket.

Joe Berlinger 17:49
That's the interesting, you know, the other, you know, other Ponzi schemes in history were, like, often, a guy is trading and he's just make some bad trades, and loses money, and it kind of morphs into a Ponzi scheme. The fascinating thing about Bernie's Ponzi scheme is that literally from day one, there was literally no investment; he was just taking people's money, creating fake statements, you know, literally going into the - this is, you know, in the, you know, before computers or whatever, you know, he would look at the newspaper, or his minions would, you know, look at the newspaper, and based on historical information, you know, anyone can bet on yesterday's horse race and win, obviously, and that's what he was doing; he would, you know, go back to historical data, pick a time to buy the stock and a time to sell the stock fictitiously because he actually wasn't doing either, and put that down on a statement and send it off to people, you know.

Matthew Sherwood 18:55
And the thing is, he didn't have to do it, did he? I mean, he had this legit business, relatively legit business, it was doing really well. He was the toast of Wall Street. I think he was head of NASDAQ for a little while. But yet to go to all this trouble - I mean, you know, I mean, not to give - no spoiler alert, you know, spoiler alert, maybe - but, I mean, it's a great scene where you talk about these two floors where the activity he had - his legit business on what is the 19th floor and then this Ponzi scheme's on the 17th floor, and the guy said it's like going back in time, but they go - they went - the amount of effort he had to go through to create these false trades to keep this thing going. He could have probably done all right, without doing - why did he do it?

Joe Berlinger 19:41
That is the sad reality. You know, I mean, nobody really knows when the Ponzi scheme began. I personally think from day one; from the day he, you know, in the - when he was a very young man, he decided to open up shop and become a stockbroker in the wild days of the stock market. And he invested poorly, and there was a crash in 1962. And he lost all of his customers' money, which at the time was only 30,000 dollars. But you know, in 62, 30,000 dollars for a young man is a lot of money. His father-in-law bailed him out and loaned him the 30,000 dollars to give back to his clients. But he decided to not tell his clients the truth. In other words, everyone else lost a shitload of money because of this big crash that happened. And he told his clients, he got out at the right time and sent them back their money with even a little profit. And he looked like a genius. And he decided he, you know, that guiding principle, he decided he'd rather be a liar than a failure, because failure haunted him, his father was a failure. And so, he was motivated by not being a failure. So, I think the Ponzi scheme began early, you know, or playing with the fast and loose with the rules began very early. He always had two businesses, you know, a legitimate business, and a business on the side managing other people's money; you know, he was, you know, he was a broker in the 60s, which all that meant was he would buy and sell stocks, and make a little money on the spread. But in addition to that, he had a side business as an investment advisor. In the 70s, he became a market maker, which is the buyer and seller of a stock of last resort. That's a legitimate business, but on the side, he continued to have this investment advisory business, and the two businesses kind of grew in parallel. So, I think he was always playing with the rules, and at some point it turned into a Ponzi scheme. But his legitimate business, as you said, would have made him a very successful person. That's the irony of this whole thing. You know, he was one of the big advocates and innovators of electronic trading, the stock market fundamentally changed when it got computerized. You know, what took weeks - literally, in the old days, you know, a transaction took weeks and you physically mailed stock certificates to the buyer, and now it's become electronic trading, and he was a big innovator in that. And he also took all the off-the-market exchanges. And what I mean by that is not the official New York Stock Exchange or American Stock Exchange, but all these smaller exchanges, where it was kind of a wild west, there was no price transparency, you didn't, you know, a stock could be sold for one price in Boston, another price in Dallas, another price in New York, there was no - it was very risky and opaque, until computerized trading. And so, all these off-the-market exchanges all became kind of one computer screen, so to speak, where there was extreme price transparency, and that is the forerunner of what became the NASDAQ market, and the NASDAQ market kind of, you know, is one of the big markets now. Apple, Google, Microsoft, all trade on the NASDAQ. And he was one of the big innovators [of] that. He was, you know, three times the head of NASDAQ. Why somebody like this would choose, you know, choose to do this is, you know, is an interesting look into psychology. Bernie himself claims it only became a Ponzi scheme when his legitimate business, you know, in the late 80s, early 90s, started having some solvency issues, and he took, he took investment advisory money, and funneled it to his legitimate business to shore it up. Actually, that was late 90s, early 2000s. That to me, sounds way too convenient. You know, I think he was guilty of this Ponzi scheme for decades.

Matthew Sherwood 24:23
Well, and as you say, he was always sort of operating outside of the law with his other side, this advisory side of things anyway, so, and there's good examples of that in the - throughout the doc. I mean, how do you - we're not gonna have too much more of your time, I think, but how do you make - you as a filmmaker, how do you make financial fraud interesting, you know?

Joe Berlinger 24:46
I don't know. Tell me, was it interesting?

Matthew Sherwood 24:50
Yes, it was. Very interesting. I have to say that I've got an economics background. So, you know, it kind of comes to me, you know, I like dramas like Margin Call, and those kind of things that have been done well, you know, but it's not the easiest thing to do. And, you know, you make - got a math that Harry, I forget his name but the derivatives guy who was, you know, reporting Madoff to the SEC all the time, he comes across really well and interesting; you know, you've got some great people that come on camera. I mean, how do you do that?

Joe Berlinger 25:23
Yeah, yeah, good question. I mean, we'll see if this translates for people. I mean, I personally, you know, interestingly, or maybe it's only interesting to me, perhaps, but, you know, I've actually been quite a bit of a stock market geek over the years, as, you know, as early as, you know, my teens, I was buying stocks, and I'm fascinated by the stock market and the financial markets. So, you know, it's something that I'm quite knowledgeable about. So, I think that helped me be able to talk to people. So that, things could be explained. I do think the big achievement of the show is that very complex concepts are delivered in a way that I don't think it's too hard to understand the content. And that's what I - you know, I wanted to bring this to life, because, again, most people think of this story as like one evil genius who manipulated the markets, but to me, it's a much deeper story. Because I'm knowledgeable enough about the markets that to me, the red flags, were so obvious to anybody who is in the business. I wanted to dissect the Ponzi and how it worked, and what all those red flags were and why it's representative of such incompetence, or worse, on the part of a lot of institutions that should have known better. Because if you can explain it in a way that you can understand, then it's - then I wanted people to understand just how easy it is to manipulate and cheat the system in part as a cautionary tale. So, that people become very, you know, take control of their finances and understand just, you know, Wall Street is not your friend, I mean, you can have a good business relationship with Wall Street, but they are not there to look out for you. They are there to make money. And so, there's certain basic rules of investing that I hope, translate to people from watching the show; like, very simple things; like, if you don't know what you're investing in, you shouldn't invest in it. If it looks too good to be true, it probably is. And Bernie's reported returns were just ridiculous, never a down year, that's just mathematically impossible in finance. And diversification. One of the reasons, so many people got hurt badly, is that it wasn't like they had 10% of their money with Bernie, they had their entire life savings. So, even forgetting a Ponzi scheme, just in general, you know, if you were 90% in one particular stock, like Facebook, in the last year, you got killed, you know, because Facebook collapsed, stock price wise, so like, just people should understand that fraud happens a lot. And that Wall Street does not have your back. I'm not saying don't invest and, you know, places like Charles Schwab or Fidelity are these major institutions, that people, you know, I think those are all fine. And I generally trust that system, but anything that's outside of the norm, you got to really think twice about.

Matthew Sherwood 28:41
Joe, I think you're gonna have to do an investment podcast or something, you know, just talk to us. And I feel like almost we're gonna need to put all those little disclaimers at the bottom of this episode, just to let people know, but - so, yeah, I think we are coming to the end of our time. So, I want to thank you again, I mean, for coming on. I mean, one last question, if I may. I mean, if, I mean, some would call you a pioneer. I know you have many imitators or at least in terms of just generally in terms of True Crime and these sorts of things. How does - now that - you put on Netflix and you see all this stuff out there, and many of it, some of it yours, obviously. But how do you stand out from the crowd these days? Or do you worry about that? And or maybe what's the key to making a good doc these days?

Joe Berlinger 29:37
Oh, I don't pay attention to what other people do, or think to myself, How do I stand out from the crowd? I, you know, I've been lucky enough to be doing this for 30 years. And, you know, I just do what interests me, and I hope that you know, it interests other people. We do seem to be in kind of a peak True Crime moment. You know, when I was - my first film was Brother's Keeper in 1992, that Bruce Sinofsky and I made, and it went to Sundance and won a prize, but nobody wanted to release it. So, we self-distributed the film ourselves, believing in the film, and, you know, schlepped 35 millimeter prints from theatre to theatre. And if 400 People watched our movie in a weekend, we'd high five each other and felt like we died and went to heaven. Oh my god. 400 people saw our movie! Wow, that's great. Now you push something out on Netflix and hundreds of millions of people see it and the crime stuff in particular is super popular. So, I just feel very lucky to be continuing to do what I do. And, you know, one day if people stop liking it, then I'll go sit on a beach somewhere.

Matthew Sherwood 30:52
Well, I think even if it falls a bit out of favor, I think you will still be - I don't think your films will be, so, thank you again for joining us. It's been a pleasure having Joe Berlinger, the director of the new Netflix docu-series, Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street. Thanks again for joining us, and it's streaming - just remind you - it's streaming on Netflix from January 4. I also would like to thank those who help make this podcast possible. A big shout out to Sam and Joe at Innersound Audio in York, England. Big thanks to Amy Ord, our podcast manager at Alamo Pictures, who ensures we continue getting great guests onto the show, and that everything otherwise run smoothly. Finally, a big thanks to our listeners. Many of you have been with us for four incredible seasons. Please keep sending us feedback and episode ideas, whether it is on YouTube, social media, or directly by email. Please also remember to like us and share us with your friends and family wherever you happen to listen or watch podcasts. This is Factual America, signing off.

Factual America Outro 32:01
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