No Movie Could Capture the Crazy Details of Bernie Madoff's Story
Bernie Madoff is back, nearly a decade after his arrest for the largest known financial fraud in history. An HBO movie, The Wizard of Lies, starring Robert De Niro, premieres on Saturday, and Madoff, an earlier ABC miniseries starring Richard Dreyfuss, have catapulted the preeminent Ponzi schemer into the limelight again, even as lawsuits to recover his investors’ losses continue to grind on in the courts.
It’s fitting that Madoff is played by such skilled actors as De Niro and Dreyfuss, both of whom have won Academy Awards: Madoff, who has been serving a 150-year sentence since 2009 for bilking thousands of investors in a Ponzi scheme, was himself a gifted actor, whose special talent for lying enabled him to bamboozle the naive and sophisticated alike.
The Hollywood versions concentrate on how Madoff’s crimes impacted his family members, who were burdened by the presumption that they must have known about the fraud. One son,
