Link ~ The Man Who Knew
December 11, 2010
Madoff’s Eldest Son Found Dead in Suicide
Mark Madoff, the older of Bernard L. Madoff’s two sons, was found dead in his Manhattan apartment on Saturday, the second anniversary of the day his father was arrested for running a gigantic Ponzi scheme that shattered thousands of lives around the world.
“Mark Madoff took his own life today,” Martin Flumenbaum Mark Madoff’s lawyer, said in a statement on Saturday. “This is a terrible and unnecessary tragedy.”
One city official said that the first notification, via 911, was at 7:27.18, on Saturday morning, and the call was for a, “possible suicide.” The call came from a fourth-floor, private house at 158 Mercer Street – a 13-story building.
Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne said the body was discovered by the victim’s father-in-law. “He came there this morning,” said Mr. Browne said.
Mr. Browne said that the victim’s “two-year-old son was asleep in an adjoining bedroom.”
Mr. Browne added: “Apparently, the son-in-law had indicated that someone should check on the child; had made some notification to the wife that he should check on the child.”
Mr. Browne could not immediately say what time Mark Madoff made that notification or say if investigators believe it was part of some plan.
Mr. Browne said the body was hanging by its neck, from a pipe in the living room ceiling. A black dog leash had been used, he said.
Since Bernard Madoff’s arrest, all the members of his immediate family have been the targets of a battery of civil lawsuits filed initially by victims of the Ponzi scheme and later by the bankruptcy court trustee pursuing assets for those victims.
The trustee’s lawsuit, filed last year, sought to recover approximately $200 million that the family received in salaries, bonuses, expense-account payments and gains in their own investment accounts at the Madoff firm. More recently, the trustee, Irving H. Picard, filed a new lawsuit in London that named Mark Madoff, 46, along with other directors and executives of the Madoff affiliate there, Madoff Securities International, Ltd. It was aimed at recovering profits and payments the defendants received from that subsidiary, on whose board Mark Madoff served.
These lawsuits are pending, and will not necessarily be derailed by Mark Madoff’s death. Typically, the litigation would continue against the estate of any deceased defendant, as was the case when Jeffry Picower, one of Bernie Madoff’s largest investors, died in October 2009.
Mr. Madoff had worked at his father’s brokerage firm since his graduation from the University of Michigan in 1987. A number of Mark’s oldest childhood friends from Roslyn, N.Y., invested with Madoff and lost their savings in the fraud. This destroyed those relationships and caused Mark great pain, says a person close to the family who requested anonymity.
The steps that led to his father’s arrest began when he and his brother, Andrew, confronted their father over his plans to distribute hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses to employees months ahead of schedule.
That led to a private conversation on Dec. 10, 2008, in which Bernard Madoff told his sons that their entire lives — all the wealth and success the family seemed to possess — were based on a lie. His apparently lucrative money-management business was nothing but an immense Ponzi scheme, and it was crumbling under the relentless pressures of the financial crisis of late 2008.
Mark and his brother immediately consulted a lawyer and were advised they had to report their father’s confession to law enforcement. They did so, and the following morning their father was arrested at his Manhattan penthouse.
The public fury over the stunning crime — whose losses Bernard Madoff himself estimated at $50 billion — was not limited to its mastermind. Mark Madoff, his mother and his brother were all the subject of constant media speculation. Some blogs repeatedly predicted their imminent arrest, and many articles speculated that they had been involved in their father’s crime, or at least were aware of it.
But charges have not been filed against any of the immediate family members, and their lawyer has said publicly that neither Mark nor his brother has ever been notified by prosecutors that they were the subjects of a criminal investigation.
A person close to Mark Madoff said he had been increasingly distraught as the anniversary of his father’s arrest approached, and he had been upset at some recent news coverage speculating that criminal charges against him and his brother were still likely.
Mr. Flumenbaum, in his statement, called Mark “an innocent victim of his father’s monstrous crime who succumbed to two years of unrelenting pressure from false accusations and innuendo.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/business/12madoff.html?_r=1&hp
