Madoff: 'F*** my victims'

That's what the swindler supposedly said after one of his fellow inmates kept badgering him about all people he scammed. "I carried them for twenty years, and now I'm doing 150 years," he added. It's one of several money quotes in a lengthy NY magazine piece by Steve Fishman about Bernie's life behind bars. In this account, Madoff actually seems relieved to have the whole mess over and done with. Fishman wasn't able to interview Madoff, but he managed to connect with a number of inmates.

Even his first stop, the hellhole of Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC), where he was locked down 23 hours a day, was a kind of asylum. He no longer had to fear the knock on the door that would signal "the jig was up," as he put it. And he no longer had to express what he didn't feel. Bernie could be himself. Pollard's former cellmate John Bowler recalls a conversation between Pollard and Madoff: "Bernie was telling a story about an old lady. She was bugging him for her money, so he said to her, 'Here's your money,' and gave her a check. When she saw the amount she says, 'That's unbelievable,' and she says, 'Take it back.' And urged her friends [to invest]."

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From MCC, Madoff explained the trap he was in. "People just kept throwing money at me," Madoff related to a prison consultant who advised him on how to endure prison life. "Some guy wanted to invest, and if I said no, the guy said, 'What, I'm not good enough?' " One day, Shannon Hay, a drug dealer who lived in the same unit in Butner as Madoff, asked about his crimes. "He told me his side. He took money off of people who were rich and greedy and wanted more," says Hay, who was released in December. People, in other words, who deserved it. There is, as it happens, honor among thieves, a fact that worked mostly to Madoff's benefit. In the context of prison, he isn't a cancer on society; he's a success, admired for his vast accomplishments.

This, of course, gets to the uncomfortable question of personal responsibility - specifically, at what point do investors go from victims to accomplices? I've heard that some investors of Ponzi schemes are actually aware that a swindle is taking place, but figure they can play along by putting in their money early and then pulling it out early (see my Los Angeles magazine article). It's unlikely that they can time their involvement so adroitly, but the fact that people are even thinking in those terms tells you something about the Ponzi culture.

Not all prisoners are part of the Bernie Madoff fan club. "You an inmate, not a convict," Bowler needled him, pointing out, "You got less than a year in the bucket," meaning he'd only just arrived in prison. That he isn't a rat--he's tried to take all the blame for his Ponzi scheme--and isn't a child molester counts in his favor. But Madoff isn't seasoned or tough. "He didn't know how to take a shower," says Bowler, now confined in a Lexington, Kentucky, facility. (At Butner, you don't get undressed until in the shower itself.) He has a reputation for messiness, which isn't respectful to a cellmate. "He wasn't prison material," says one ex-con dismissively. Madoff seemed helpless to some. This former inmate had given himself tattoos with a device he built from a beard trimmer, a toothbrush, and a Bic pen--"A real con can jerry-rig anything," Bowler told me.