What made Madoff tick?

Madoff: The Man Who Stole $65 Billion
Erin Arvedlund
Penguin £9.99, 320 pages
ISBN 9780141045467
✆ £7.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655

Madoff’s Other Secret: Love, Money, Bernie, and Me
Sheryl Weinstein
St Martin’s Press £14.56, 224 pages
ISBN 9780312618377

Madoff with the Money
Jerry Oppenheimer
Wiley & Sons £16.99, 272 pages
ISBN 9780470504987
✆ £13.59

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The moment in the ‘grooming gangs’ debate that shamed Jess Phillips

The Believers: How America Fell for Bernard Madoff’s $65 Billion Investment Scam
Adam LeBor
Weidenfeld & Nicolson £18.99, 312 pages
ISBN 9780297859192
✆ £15.19

It is less than a year since Bernard Madoff took his sons into his confidence about the true nature of his fund management business, in which they were junior partners, and they accordingly reported him to the US authorities. With the anniversary approaching, there are already several books available about America’s greatest ever fraudster. Most mention a figure of $65 billion, although, as Erin Arvedlund points out in the best of these books, Madoff: The Man Who Stole $65 Billion, this figure is misleading, since ‘it included phantom gains Madoff had been booking in client accounts over many years. Much of these billions in profits never existed at all, except on paper’. Depending on when the fraud started, which is uncertain, the money investors put in was probably never higher than $30 billion, while the amount Madoff paid to third-party fundraisers was around $15 billion. Not that this makes it any less reprehensible.

Arvedlund was the first journalist to suggest that Madoff’s business was unsound, in an article for the US financial magazine Barron’s, although a couple of investment professionals had blown the whistle on him to an asleep-at-the-wheel Securities & Exchange Commission. Her book is lively and as thorough as possible this soon afterwards. Some of Madoff’s victims were more special than others, she explains.