Madoff, Bernard Lawrence
[key], 1938–2021, American stockbroker, investment manager, and
swindler, b. New York City, grad. Hofstra College (B.A., 1960). In the early
1960s he founded Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, which bought and
sold inexpensive over-the-counter stocks and later traded blue-chip stocks.
The firm, which gained an edge by being one of the first to be completely
automated, was by the 1980s one of the largest trading companies, with New
York and London offices. Madoff served as chairman of the NASDAQ stock
exchange from 1990 to 1993. Acting as an agent for individuals, foundations,
charities, and other groups, Madoff's firm produced unusually consistent
profits on a portfolio that was ultimately worth some $17 billion, and he
became a wealthy and respected Wall St. insider. In 2008, however, as the
American financial crisis deepened, Madoff acknowledged that since the early
1990s he had been running an elaborate Ponzi scheme in which new investments
were used to pay dividends on existing investments while Madoff himself
skimmed millions of dollars to pay for a lavish life. (Later, an associate
admitted that fraud had occurred since the 1970s.) Accused of cheating
thousands of investors of as much as $65 billion in all, Madoff pleaded
guilty (2009) to fraud, theft, and other charges and was sentenced to 150
years in prison.
See E. Arvenlund, Too Good to Be True (2009); A. Kirtzman, Betrayal (2009); D. B. Henriques, The Wizard of Lies (2011).
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2024, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
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