Life imitating literature: The Bernard Madoff scandal

Recent news has been dominated by the scandal involving Bernard L. Madoff and the enormous scam he pulled on investors. While the scandal seems almost unreal (who would have imagined such a large Ponzi scheme making, and then losing, such large quantities of money), only in the world of literature could something on this scale be imagined.

Before I get into the meat of this post, however, I just want to say that Madoff represents the worst of the worst. His unending greed has ruined the lives of countless investors and has even placed many non-profits into financial jeopardy. Madoff deserves to spend the rest of his days in prison where he’ll probably work for only pennies a day and have a few meager belongings. But even life in prison won’t be enough of a punishment for a thug like him. Just my opinion though.

I never thought I’d actually be posting about this scandal until I read this article from the New York Times Books Section. The article makes a rather pointed statement that large and bizarre crimes like this can rarely be thought of by most, except by those who get paid to use their imagination – writers!

The accusations against Mr. Madoff may seem so outlandish and outsize that only a literary imagination could have dreamed him up. And indeed, where businessmen, psychologists, theologians and prosecutors have so far come up short in explaining the tangle of human emotions and drives behind the Madoff enterprise, literature and drama have provided plenty of models.

The 2008 Madoff scandal, the article says, is almost an exact copy of a play written a century ago called "The Voysey Inheritance":

David Mamet, who adapted "Voysey" for The Atlantic, explained in a New York Times interview at the time why he was initially drawn to the play.

"What is capital?" he said. "How does society work? What is money? On the one hand you can say money is meaningless: it doesn’t really exist, and so everything is really all about trust. You can also say that means it’s all about crime."

There’s also a book called The Way We Live Now (aff link) that also features a greedy character looking to rip off well-meaning investors:

His shady financier, Augustus Melmotte, is at the center of a huge scam, selling shares in a railroad that doesn’t exist. He is widely regarded as the financial sector’s presiding genius, "the very navel of the commercial enterprise of the world," and his ruin, as Lord Alfred observes in the novel, "would be the bursting of half London." Many of Melmotte’s attributes can be found in some of the real-life rogues who preyed on credulous British investors in that period.

It’s interesting that while Wall Street and the financial industry have been rocked to their core by this scandal and others, in literature, it’s business as usual. And perhaps it is only in literature that the motives, thoughts and internal motivations of such nefarious characters can only be known.

There will be many people, from prosecutors to psychologists, who will try to decipher Mr. Madoff’s mind to figure out why he did such a thing. My personal opinion, it comes down to one word: Greed! People get a taste of making money, and want more – and sadly will do anything to get it.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with making money or wanting to make money. The problem comes in when it overtakes your life and/or you start doing illegal things to acquire more money.

Maybe, just maybe, the next big scandal to hit Wall Street can be found in the pages of a literary classic, or even a work of contemporary fiction.

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