Madoff with the Money by Jerry Oppenheimer Read Free Book Online Page A

owned a drugstore in Springfield Gardens, a community next to Laurelton.
    Sondra and Marvin Wiener, who became a dentist, fell in love and got married.
    â€œElliott’s mother wasn’t too happy that her nephew married Sondra, because she didn’t like the Madoff family,” says Sheila Olin.
    Over the years Sondra and Marvin Wiener, like thousands of others, invested their money with Bernie—Sondra having full trust in her brother’s financial acumen, and faith that he would never injure her and her family financially. After all, Bernie was blood, a sibling, and a genius in their eyes when it came to making money for people. One of the Wieners’ sons, Charles, even went to work at Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities (BLMIS) in the 1970s, and became the firm’s director of administration.
    Apparently this mattered little to Bernie, because all of the Wieners would be among the victims in his monstrous Ponzi scheme.
    But all of that was still to come.

    While Sheila Olin notes that Elliott’s mother, who died in the late 1960s, never went into detail regarding her ill will and suspicions about Ralph and Sylvia Madoff—“she never said why, how, where”—she believes it had to do with, among other possibilities, a shady stock brokerage operation that the Madoffs were running out of their home, which was located across the street and around the corner from the Olins.
    It wasn’t until later, in August 1963—with her son already running Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, then an over-the-counter and penny stock trading business, and doing quite well for himself at the age of 25—that Bernie’s mother tangled with the SEC—a precursor of the problems Bernie would have later. The agency forced the closing of a broker-dealer operation called Gibralter Securities, which was registered to Sylvia Madoff and operated out of the Madoff home. She was one of 48 broker-dealers who, according to SEC records, had “failed to file reports of their financial condition.”
    The violation resulted in a September 1963 hearing for Sylvia Madoff and the other firms under investigation. In January 1964, the administrative proceeding against Bernie’s mother was suddenly dropped. It is believed that she agreed to a deal to get out of the stock business as long as no penalties were leveled against her.
    An SEC litigation release stated that the Madoff firm and the others “conceded the violation, but requested withdrawal of their registrations, and in this connection they represented that they are no longer engaged in the securities business and do not owe any cash or securities to customers. The Commission concluded that the public interest would be served by permitting withdrawal, and discontinued its proceedings.”
    However, suspicions about the Madoff operation lingered. There were those who thought she might have been fronting for her husband in Gibralter Securities—using her name instead of his because Ralph Madoff appeared to have ongoing financial problems and tax troubles. One of Bernie’s Far Rockaway High School friends, Edwin Heiberger, who had met Ralph Madoff on a couple of occasions, had gotten the distinct impression from him that he “was a stockbroker.” And another high school friend, Peter Zaphiris, clearly remembers Ralph Madoff working alongside Bernie in 1963, several years after Bernie started his firm.
    (Years later, the other most important woman in Bernie’s life besides his mother—his wife Ruth—would have her name on homes and other assets that sparked suspicion after Bernie was arrested.)
    In addition, the Madoff house where Bernie grew up had liens against it for unpaid federal income taxes amounting to $13,245.28—equal to about $100,000 in 2009 dollars. Once again Sylvia Madoff’s name, rather than Ralph’s, was on all the official paperwork. She was listed as the