Madoff ’s monstrous gambles
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The Wizard Of Lies (Sky Atlantic)
MAGINE for a moment that Bernie Madoff, who ran what was probably the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time, had been under the influence of alcohol for much of his career in the shakedown business.
We may be sure that The Wizard Of Lies, the HBO drama/documentary directed by Barry Levinson with Robert de Niro as Madoff, would have gone large on the old alcoholism, on how it started and how it never stopped, on the ways in enabled the wizard to do all his lying, on the ways it destroyed him in the end.
Indeed, this might have been the core of the drama, with Levinson making an executive decision to make this less of a story of a matter of great public importance and more a story of one man’s addiction, and the incalculable harm that it caused.
You could imagine de Niro acting up a storm, portraying a drunkard who is always trying not to appear drunk, and succeeding most of the time. And in the final scene, you would not have Madoff wondering if he is perhaps “a sociopath”, you would already have had a very clear insight into his personality defects, that here was essentially an alcoholic and that any other pathologies which he possessed could be dealt with later.
Well, as it happened, Bernie Madoff did have an addiction — not to alcohol, but to gambling. There can be no doubt about this: the energies which drove him are precisely those of the compulsive gambler — the capacity to take the most astonishing risks, to deal in vast amounts of money as if they were nothing at all, to possess the wild levels of confidence in one’s own ability to keep the show on the road, and the equally wild levels of denial when things are not going so well.
This was Bernie Madoff’s problem, from which all the others followed. And yet it is a sign of how little understanding there is of the nature of gambling addiction, that even the word “gamble” was hardly used at all in this otherwise respectable narrative.
And this may be the element it lacked — this sense of the interior life of Madoff, telling us not just what he did, but why he did it.
Then again, it was very strong on what he did. And de Niro was just about perfect in personifying this weird individual, in that weird time when people like him were making unconscionable amounts of money, and nobody seemed to know how they were doing it. Nor did they care to find out, if truth be told.
His two sons put this point to the investigators who claimed that family members who worked with him simply must have known that Bernie was running “the biggest pyramid scheme since the actual Pyramids”. If it was so obvious, the sons argued, why wasn’t it obvious to the FBI and to any other regulatory agency who seemed to go along with everyone else in accepting that Madoff was just a genius who was always winning. Always.
Indeed, many of us had perhaps forgotten that both of the sons are now dead, one of them by suicide, the other from cancer, while Bernie lives his days in the penitentiary, theorising that he was just the sacrificial offering thrown out by Wall Street to appease the mob.
Which, to an extent, he was — indeed, Madoff seemed to have had a certain dislike of rich people in general, when he wasn’t making them richer. And being one of them.
Moreover, any fraudster who gets found out when all around him, many other fraudsters are getting away with it, can justifiably call himself, at the very least, unlucky. But what Bernie should be calling himself is what he truly was — a pathological gambler.
He and everyone writing about it, and everyone making otherwise excellent HBO shows about it, should be calling it this way. He was a gambler working in the most extravagant culture of gambling in human history, all the more so because it’s not even called gambling.
And he embodied that most peculiar thing about gambling — that it’s only a problem if you lose. Available on Sky Catchup