new york | There are two things Elie Wiesel can’t forgive: the Holocaust, and the $50 billion swindle allegedly perpetrated by Jewish financier Bernard Madoff.
“I would like him to be in a solitary cell with a screen,” Wiesel said at a panel discussion in Manhattan last week. “And on that screen, for at least five years of his life, every day and every night there should be pictures of his victims, one after the other after the other, always saying ‘Look, look what you have done to this poor lady, look what you have done to this child, look what you have done.’
“Whatever [could] hurt him I think should be invented, because he deserves it,” the Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate added.
Wiesel recounted how he lost $15.2 million from his foundation — as well as his life savings — in perhaps the largest Ponzi scheme in history.
The 80-year-old was alternately disdainful and bemused, calling Madoff “a crook, a thief, a scoundrel” and chuckling as he recalled a meeting the two men had over dinner about 20 years ago. The topic of money never came up, Wiesel said, but they did talk about many subjects, including ethics.
“Yes, ethics,” he said
Asked by moderator Joanne Lipman, editor of Condé Nast’s Portfolio magazine, how Madoff got the trust of “so many established and intelligent people,” Wiesel admitted he bought into the Madoff mystique.
There “was a myth that he created around him that everything was so special, so unique, that it had to be secret,” he said.
Now Wiesel and others are ready for payback. About 2,400 people, including Wiesel, have so far filed claims in federal bankruptcy court, and thousands of additional eligible victims are expected to file before the court’s July 2 deadline.
Bankruptcy investigators have recovered only about $950 million in assets — including art Madoff, 70, kept at his Manhattan office — that can be put toward repaying victims for their lost investments.
Duped investors — a list that includes Jewish Hall of Fame baseball player Sandy Koufax and actors John Malkovich and Kevin Bacon — might also be eligible for up to $500,000 each from a U.S. government insurance program.
Lawyers say that to be made whole, investors will have to look to the vast array of intermediaries who failed to spot red flags before Madoff’s unprecedented pyramid scheme unraveled in December, prompting his arrest by federal authorities.
“These third parties were paid fees, significant fees, to manage these accounts and they did not do due diligence,” said Sandra Stein, an attorney who helped win a record $7.2 billion award for investors bilked by failed energy trading company Enron from banks that underwrote the company’s fraudulent activities.
At first, Wiesel and his wife put only their personal funds into Madoff accounts.
But “because we did so well, we said, come on, we have so many projects,” he said. “Everybody told us in the field of finances, you can do much more … because of Mr. Madoff, the savior.”
Over the years, he and his wife received monthly statements showing Madoff had made stock trades. Investigators now believe no securities were ever bought or sold.
Looking back, Wiesel suspects he was being scammed from the moment he met Madoff.
“Was he already a crook? Probably,” he said.
Tom Hays of the Associated Press contributed to this report.