Madoff with the Money by Jerry Oppenheimer Read Free Book Online

the only kid in his Laurelton crowd who didn’t have Keds on his feet. And it embarrassed him no end. As a close friend notes, “His mother would buy his sneakers from a pile at a department store because they were priced cheaper, as opposed to buying him the more expensive Keds, the name brand that everyone wore.”
    Through the years certain friends who were aware of the Keds story would tease Bernie about it, especially as he became rich and powerful, and displayed the symptoms of what his friends and employees believed to be an obsessive-compulsive disorder.
    â€œBernie liked things to be done right,” observes the close friend. “He liked to look nice. He liked expensive shoes and suits, cars and boats and houses. He liked his home to look just right; he wanted his office to look perfect—everything had to be perfect and in its place. And we used to kid around that he became compulsive about those things because his mother wouldn’t buy him Keds when he was a kid like everyone else.”
    Later on, though, Bernie was determined to show everyone that he could have all the Keds he ever wanted, and lots more.
    Bernie was clearly embarrassed by the way his parents lived and acted. Therefore, few of his friends were ever invited into the Madoff home. The place was off-limits and the household had an air of secrecy about it. Social gatherings and parties in which Bernie was involved—and he was thought of by most as a popular, friendly, good-looking kid—were always at the homes of others.
    According to Sheila Olin, Elliott’s widow, the mother of Bernie’s best school friend distrusted and therefore disliked the Madoffs. Sheila Olin, a popular and cute girl who was the president of the social and cliquey sorority Phi Delta Gamma during her junior year of high school, asserts,“My husband’s mother never wanted Elliott to be friends with Bernie, because she thought his parents weren’t honest people. She did not want them to be friends, and she was not happy about it. She thought Bernie’s parents were not owning up to a lot of things they were doing.”
    In fact, there were a lot of things about the Madoffs that didn’t add up. One such source of constant neighborhood speculation was Ralph’s and Sylvia’s occupations. “It was always a mystery what Ralph and Sylvia did,” says longtime Bernie friend Joe Kavanau. “That’s absolutely a fact and it’s kind of weird.”
    Ralph told some people he was a plumber, but no one remembers him ever doing any actual plumbing as a way to make a living. Years later he described himself to Bernie’s personal messenger, Bill Nasi, as “a plumber in a pin-striped suit.”
    Moreover, on the Madoffs’ 1932 certificate of marriage, the groom mysteriously listed “credit” as his occupation, while his bride put down “none.”
    Even Ralph Madoff ’s middle initial—the letter Z —was a fabrication of sorts. He decided it would be classier to have a middle initial, so he just chose to use the last letter of the alphabet.
    Elliott Olin’s mother especially disliked Ralph Madoff. “She used to say she liked Ralph less than Sylvia,” recalls Sheila Olin, whose husband, a lawyer who specialized in workers’ compensation, died of leukemia in his mid-50s. “Elliott’s mother told him many times, ‘I don’t want you being in the Madoff house.’ Bernie was at Elliott’s house much more than Elliott was over at Bernie’s. She didn’t want Elliott to be friends with Bernie.”
    But Elliott, whose father was a lawyer, ignored his mother’s entreaties, and he and Bernie would remain close friends for a number of years.
    To add insult to injury, Bernie and Elliott introduced Sondra Madoff, Bernie’s slender and attractive older sister, to Elliott’s cousin, Marvin Wiener, a good-looking young man whose family