New York’s Latest Public Hanging

Another cruel public display, much needed and primarily cathartic, has been celebrated in New York, with the most tremendous sentence ever inflicted on a white-collar Wall Street employee. A criminal who has never shed a drop of blood, but has destroyed more lives than any single violent criminal, has earned himself 150 years in prison.

For Bernie Madoff, now labeled a “serial criminal,” a century and a half of jail is basically a sentence to a “white death.” In a country where nobody is immune from the law, from the president of the United States, to the lowly miners, to the brokers of Wall Street, justice is terrible and harsh, although it often arrives too late to rescue the victims. The 150 years of jail time meted out to Bernie Madoff yesterday by the state of New York won’t be enough to return the 170 billion dollars of damages and lost interests to the thousands of small and big savers who put their lives in his hands and found themselves broke. Madoff received almost a year in jail for every stolen billion, but that will not repair the damage done.

If the apartments in Manhattan, the houses on the Cote d’Azur, the yachts, his wife’s jewels, and the rest of a personal fortune that experts have yet to value completely, cannot adequately repay the victims or restore the budgets to the hospitals and foundations for cancer research, at least that century and a half can provide a sense of justice that, slowly, has touched someone who considered himself too rich and too powerful to be vulnerable.

If there was someone who should have felt safe, after operating 49 years of business finance schemes that brought him up from his father’s house in Queens – a plumber who specialized in automatic garden sprinklers – to the summits of the “high society” of Manhattan, it was Bernie Madoff. He was known as “Uncle Bernie” to his clients, wooers, friends and renowned personalities, like Nobel Prize winner and Shoa survivor Elie Wiesel and director Steven Spielberg.

Madoff’s scheme touched even the most important Jewish families in New York and the Jewish community on the whole has been especially affected by the trial. The hoax has stirred up latent resentment for the powerful Jewish elite and the case has been surrounded by a resurgence of anti-Semitism.

The punishment, therefore, had to be exemplary, the worst ever inflicted in the history of Wall Street by the American jurisprudence since “white collar” crime was first defined in the Great Depression of the 1930s. It was then that the Roosevelt administration and his Congress first tried to bridle the crazy horses of Wall Street that had time and again brought down the caravan of the world economy. Thus, the reasoning behind a 150 year sentence for “the most monstrous financial crime ever seen.” Not only did the judge seek to punish a serial swindler, but it was also to signal to another generation that the “roaring years” of finance have come to an end and that the wind has changed on Wall Street.

It is likely that the state of New York was also eager to sweep away the belief that, in an American democracy, there are those who are “more equal than others” in front of the law and that wealth protects you from the “long arm” of justice. The president and creator of Enron, Kenneth Lay, a good friend of Bush and Cheney, was also sentenced to life imprisonment. He died soon after of a heart attack from the shock.

Madoff certainly paid for the others, too, for swindlers less unabashed than him, coinsures of the Ponzi scheme (a method of cheating the system, named for it’s Italian inventor, Carlo Ponzi, of Lugo, Emilia Romagna).

Uncle Bernie restricted himself to depositing the investments into his account at the Chase Manhattan Bank; he would then pay the interest on that money. After 50 years of “living a big lie,” Madoff walked himself in one continuous circle until he fell and confessed everything to his sons. The crack in the U.S. banking system revealed mechanisms and investments in Madoff’s scheme that defined “toxic.” It was a method not much different – besides the apparent academic sophistication – from the trick of taking money from Peter to pay Paul’s interests, without really investing in anything concrete.

Bernie Madoff amassed a fortune by building pyramids based on nothing, founded on the illusion of multiplication of an imaginary richness. His “white execution” – being 71, he’ll die in jail and suffer the remainder of his life under prison’s brutal hospitality – is a symbolic, necessary and redemptive display for a society that can’t catch everyone, no matter the color of their shirt’s collar.

That society, periodically and often according to the ideological color of the government, has to prove to its citizens that, from a president with anti–constitutional instincts like Nixon to a New York governor with cheeky female acquaintances like Spitzer, not everyone can deceive everyone all the time. Not even “Uncle Bernie.”