Madoff

Bernard Madoff is out on us$10m bail. He's confined to his us$7m flat in Manhattan's silk stocking district. He's bilked his investors of us$50bn, yet for all intents and purposes, he is a free man living in the luxury he is used to. Why isn't he in prison orange and in Riker's island sharing the life of an ordinary felon? Well, as F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, the rich are different.
Madoff is 70. He's shouldering full blame for his Ponzi scheme, thereby trying to save his two sons, daughter, and brother from criminal pursuit. Nobel? Hardly!
He got away with it as he boasted, he could make money when the market was up or down but not when it went flatter than a pancake. It did...at the very moment he was looking for foreign suckers to sustain his pyramid scheme. Now, the slow wheels of justice are churning as government officials look into feeder funds and accounting firms and other 'louche' arrangements which allowed Madoff & co. to bilk his clients from day one.
Madoff won't find much cheer among his fellow Jews, whom he robbed gladly...Yeshiva University, Steven Spielberg's Wunderkind foundation, and the Eli Weisel Fund, among others. They entrusted endowments which overtime grew steadily so that they could expand charitable work, it seems, but wisely kept private money away from Madoff's greedy mitts. Madoff fooled large banks...Bank of Scotland, France's BNP, HSBC...not to mention the wealthy and comfortable who now are hurting badly in the autumn of their lifetime.
It is doubtful Madoff will see much prison time. But that is the affair of justice and a jury of his peers.
His machination had the complicity of the greedy but also of a mindset who thought the market itself could regulate foul play. It didn't. So new laws and older statutes will be better observed perhaps, but they won't stop those always looking for the golden ring of making a buck and quick. Nonetheless, harsh measures are called for; hardly a cent will be recovered, but Madoff & his kind especially his close confederates and those at the feeders fund deserve long terms in prison.