Kathryn Lofton’s luminous essay on the ritual form of the wedding announcement helped me to understand what has perplexed and fascinated me so about reportage of the Madoff scandal. The issue is one of tone, finding the right tone for a wedding announcement, or for a meditation on a scandal of such colossal proportions.
Lofton captures the melancholic heart of the thing—if it were not so, then why should death play such a prominent part in the very ceremony from which we should most wish to protect it? “Til death do us part,” we say, reminding ourselves in the very moment of joining that we are committing ourselves equally to an inevitable parting.
How should we look upon the smiling faces, the desperate notes, the brief snippets of biography, the inspiring hopes, the sense of infinite possibility? Lofton invites us into an almost terrifying honesty: when we gaze upon such pictures, we cannot help but imagine the whole thing unraveling, as fully half of these unions will, statistically speaking. As Susan Sontag noted long ago, photography has always enjoyed a special intimacy with catastrophe.
So I return to Vanity Fair, and its attempts to put a human face on the Bernie Madoff saga.
One of the most striking features of the reportage are all the family photographs. Each month’s installment is replete with new pictures of the Madoff family in happier times (who in God’s name gave them to the magazine? Friends? For money?…). These pictures have added weight, and create far greater confusion, today.
The July installment finally raises the question that hovers over this family affair: did Madoff’s two sons know what was up? How could they possibly not have known? We are right back to the bizarre equation to the Holocaust I discussed previously. How could someone as intimately involved with Hitler as Albert Speer was, how could anyone working in the dark heart of the Chancellory, not have known what was afoot?
David Margolick poses these questions perfectly in the July edition of Vanity Fair:
[I]t’s pretty clear they should have known something was amiss. Were they willful or lazy or fearful or indifferent or oblivious or adoring or in denial? Were they too intimidated or loyal to object? Too passive to care? Too addicted to the wealth to resist, or just too dumb to discern?
What is strangest about this third installment in Vanity Fair’s Madoff series is how flat it falls in the end. Did Bernie Madoff’s two sons, Mark (aged 45) and Andrew (43), know about the Ponzi scheme that bankrupted some 80,000 investors? If they did not, then which of the above hypotheses best explains their amazing lack of discernment. There is no answer provided in the article, and indeed, there is little sense of how one could ever find an answer. This installment is less than half as long as the June exposé from Madoff’s secretary.
That bears thinking about. The story about the secretary is much longer, much more substantive, than the one about the family. All we get from the family is confusion.
One guy swears up and down that Bernie Madoff adored his sons and found joy in his work only because it was a family affair. Another guy, equally eyewitness, swears that the elder Madoff was a tyrant who never permitted his sons to grow into their profession, or even to grow up.
He loved them; he hated them. They loved him; they were terrified of him. The brothers never speak anymore; they talk on the phone at least once a day. It’s all there and it’s all unclear.
All we know for a fact is that it all came apart very suddenly.
On December 9, 2008, Bernie Madoff told his son, Mark, that he intended to pay out $173 million in holiday bonuses two months early. Deeply concerned, Mark revealed this to Andrew, who concluded that Madoff Securities should probably be re-named.
The brothers descended upon their father in his office the next morning and demanded an explanation. Fearing that he might lose his composure, the elder Madoff suggested that they return to his apartment, where he told them everything. Mark allegedly exploded; Andrew wept.
That evening, Bernie and his wife, Ruth, hosted their annual Christmas dinner at “Rosa Mexicana” on the posh East Side. The boys were not there. The following morning, December 11th, Bernie Madoff was arrested, and the story erupted.
Neither of the sons has seen their father since the 10th of December. They have not visited him in the Metropolitan Correctional Center where he awaits sentencing on June 29, not even when they were serving jury duty literally next door.
But is this an expression of genuine anger and dismay? Or is it all part of Bernie Madoff’s elaborate choreography designed to insulate his sons and take the fall alone?
The fact that this is an impossible question to answer is itself interesting. The scandal is as hard to read as the family photos are, now.
And thus the Madoff series ends with a whimper. Or rather, with two images, each terrifying to consider.
The most relevant legal culpability that may apply to the two Madoff boys is the same as the guilt-by-association of drug dealers’ girlfriends, Margolick suggests. That is, such women are guilty of receiving money they should have known was tainted. So too the Madoff boys. It seems a bit surreal, but there it is.
That was the tone Kathryn Lofton captured so well in her piece, I think. How should one look at the old wedding photos now, from the perspective of utter collapse, the loss of everything dear? Worse still, how should one see these pictures from a prison cell?
“Now we see through a glass darkly, then face to face.”
Everything hinges on the architecture, not the architecture of a family, any family, but rather the literal architecture of Madoff’s three-story securities complex. The two boys worked on the 19th floor; the Ponzi scheme was handled on the 17th floor. The boys claim they hardly ever set foot on the 17th floor. Others insist that building floors are very porous membranes indeed. The money, like the guilt, flows freely.
The mystery deepens in the case of a man like Bernie Madoff, because he so mysteriously found a way to have it both ways.
The offices on the 19th floor were transparent. They were walls of glass. But Bernie Madoff designed them with a special feature: he could hit a button, and the glass would miraculously turn white, like a wall.
“Now you see it, now you don’t.” Like all the money.
I am haunted by this image, now. You can see through the thing; suddenly you cannot. It is a window; it is a wall. Then how, and what, will we ever truly see?
