The thing most striking to me about the Bernard Madoff case was how quickly he confessed guilt for his $65 billion scam. From the moment he was caught, Madoff admitted he was running a Ponzi scheme; he almost seemed relieved to be free of it, and yet perversely proud at its sheer size.
With his assets, he could have dragged this thing out for years, the way the Enron crooks did. Indeed, because Ken Lay died while his case was on appeal, his conviction was "abated," which means that, in the eyes of the law, he was never tried. Therefore his wife, the equally crooked Linda Lay—who sold half a million shares of Enron 10 minutes before the company's collapse went public—gets to keep all the stolen loot.
But Madoff admitted his guilt, and now he is going away for the rest of his life. His eagerness to be sentenced may, of course, be a ploy to keep from having to name names—and, as his wife, brother and other progeny scramble to get lawyers, this no doubt shaped his thinking. Still, it is nice to see one of these monstrously crooked figures stand up and admit he is guilty.
We've just come through eight years during which our nation's record budget surplus turned into a record deficit; during which we were attacked by terrorists after the White House ignored clear CIA warnings about planes hitting buildings; during which we were devastated by a hurricane the damage from which was exacerbated by the criminal neglect of the same government, which also rescinded habeas corpus and approved torture (and, in some cases, murder) of prisoners.
This same group was criminally negligent in monitoring Wall Street, leading to the collapse of the economy, the ruination of millions of people and the bailout of some of the same criminals responsible for the crisis, many of whom are getting bonuses from the same pockets they originally picked. Our government also started a war under false pretenses, invaded a sovereign country in violation of international law and murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians.
I could use up the rest of my allotted space with this litany of criminality. But my point is that, despite all of the above, it is bizarre how only one person has admitted guilt to anything that occurred in the past eight years. If we are to judge by the lack of individual remorse, all this criminality just happened—like spontaneous combustion. Or, as Condi Rice put it, "Nobody could have anticipated&" Madoff was a crook, but the environment in which he committed his crimes was filled with so many other mini-Madoffs that we may never be able to get a complete accounting of the crimes.
On a far smaller scale but similarly, in Waterbury, Ct., near where I live, an absentee landlord was recently arrested following years of criminal neglect at his apartments, neglect that included holes in roofs, cracks in walls, chronic non-payment of taxes, trash pickup fees and heating bills. His behavior put hundreds of people's lives in danger.
The city finally intervened, filled the oil tank and arrested the landlord, who lives in New York. Last year, my wife had written an award-winning series of articles about Burmese refugees who had come to Waterbury, many of whom lived in this man's buildings. When she spoke to the landlord about the problems they were encountering at his apartments, he all but told her that "these people" were the scum of the earth, unworthy even of the most basic decencies from a landlord. My wife is not easily shocked, but she was shocked by this man's callousness.
When he was finally arrested a year later, the landlord was practically wetting his pants and weeping while standing in front of the judge. His tough-guy pose was gone, his voice reduced to a squeaky little peep. He scraped together his bail, and will probably avoid prison. Still, it was nice to see a patently guilty man face some consequences.
If only this were contagious.
