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

“grantor/mortgager” for the property, according to Queens borough property records. The taxes were assessed in 1956, the year Bernie graduated from high school, and it wasn’t until 1965, when Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities celebrated its fifth anniversary in business, that the lien was finally paid off and the Madoff house was sold, with Ralph and Sylvia moving to the town of Lynbrook (an anagram for Brooklyn) on Long Island, a short distance from Laurelton.
    It was in that sort of troubled and seemingly ethically and morally bankrupt household that Bernie’s values, principles, behavior, sense of right and wrong, ideals, and standards were established.

    Bernie bonded with Elliott Olin—and fell head over heels for Ruthie Alpern—at Public School 156 in Laurelton, where he got his elementary and middle school education.
    Located about five blocks from the Madoff home on 228th Street, P.S. 156 was typical of the New York City public schools that were built around the time of the Great Depression—a three-story brick building with a high chain-link-style fence surrounding a playground. Inside the classrooms were too hot in the summer, and too cold in the winter. Mostly everyone wanted to walk home for lunch because of the yucky food served in the cafeteria.
    The school, which went from kindergarten through the eighth grade, was located between the Long Island Railroad station and Merrick Road, Laurelton’s main drag and commercial center.
    Even though it was part of the urban landscape of New York and less than 30 minutes from bustling Times Square, there was a simple, small-town feel to Laurelton in those days—the wartime 1940s and the postwar Ozzie and Harriet 1950s when Bernie Madoff was coming of age. The kids called the local movie theater “the itch” and paid 25 cents on Saturday afternoons for a show of 25 cartoons. They went for ice cream at Raab’s, a drugstore with a genuine soda fountain, browsed for yo-yos and gliders and rubber balls for stickball games at Woolworth’s, and gathered with their families for Sunday dinners of chow mein and egg rolls at Chung’s Chinese restaurant.
    Because it was on the train line, Laurelton was a commuter town. Women were homemakers, and most husbands took the train into the city every day. The breadwinners ranged from small, struggling businessmen and New York City cops to accountants and doctors. Like the city itself, Laurelton was a melting pot.
    â€œIt was a magical place to grow up,” as one former Laureletonian observed a half-century later.
    At school Bernie became Elliott Olin’s shadow. Elliott was the most popular boy at P.S. 156, handsome with curly blond hair, and was considered a hunk by the girls. Everywhere Elliott went and everything Elliott did, Bernie followed suit. “They were like Martin and Lewis, always together,” observes Olin’s widow, who from the time she first met Bernie thought of him as “a smooth talker” and “devious.”
    Jay Portnoy observes that Bernie “was never really that much of a leader, but he was always with the leader—Olin.” He continues, “Elliott was good-looking, highly intelligent, willing to convince people to do things. Bernie was a follower, and the two of them seemed to work very well together.”
    So the two became partners in a social enterprise.
    In seventh grade, Bernie and Olin started a club called the Ravens, and even had sweaters made with a Raven on them. One had to be considered among the school’s elite to be in the club. Jay Portnoy, who became a member, recalls that the club had a “reverse quota system.” Because the boys met at the Laurelton Jewish Center, the Ravens “always had to have one more Jew than non-Jew,” he said. “If a popular gentile was wanted as a member, they had to search for a usually less popular Jew to invite.”
    Bernie liked sports, but he