While the estimated 50 billion dollars lost in the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme is undoubtedly a staggering amount of money, what’s even more staggering is the effect Madoff’s criminality is having on his victims.
- Take, for example, Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, who was found sitting at his desk on Tuesday with both wrists slashed. The 65 year-old de la Villhuchet, who ran Access International Advisors, lost approximately one billion dollars of his clients’ money as a result of Madoff’s 50 billion dollar pyramid scheme.
- And then there’s the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, , which lost just over 15.2 million dollars as a result of the Madoff pyramid scheme. The 15.2 million dollars lost by the Wiesel Foundation represents nearly all that foundation’s assets.
- And poor Eliot Spitzer is alleged to be a victim of the Madoff pyramid scheme. 2008 was bad enough for Eliot Spitzer, so the last thing he needed was to be bilked out of money by a con artist.
Fifty billion dollars is a heck of a lot of money, but it’s important to remember that behind those dollars and cents are real people; people like the ones listed above.
I got a panicked letter from the ACLU this week saying that two of the foundations that regularly give them sizable donations have been devastated by the Madoff scam, so the ACLU is in desperate straits as well. This is affecting a lot of people and a lot of organizations, not so much directly as indirectly.
Yeah, I’m willing to bet we’ve not seen the worst impact of the Madoff scam yet.