The four-part documentary, directed by Joe Berlinger, features interviews with whistleblowers, former employees, investigators and victims of Madoff’s actions.
Madoff’s Ponzi scheme saw him swindle people out of millions, including actor Kevin Bacon, director Steven Spielberg and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.
Here is everything you need to know about Madoff and what happened to him.
What Happened to Bernie Madoff and Where Is He Now?
Madoff was a former New York financier. He first entered Wall Street in 1960 and his investment business took off between the 1970s and ’80s.
It was during this period that he became the director of Nasdaq (National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations), an electronic stock exchange that was the first of its kind, for three one-year terms.
Madoff attested that he began committing financial fraud in 1992, and the $64 billion Ponzi scheme saw him using the cash from new investors to pay the old ones. It wiped out people’s life savings, financially damaged charities and devastated countless victims.
During the 2008 financial crisis Madoff was unable to pay $7 billion to his clients and confessed to his sons, who were senior employees at his firm, that the operation was “basically a giant Ponzi scheme” and was “all one big lie.”
He informed them that he would surrender to authorities, and a lawyer informed the FBI and federal prosecutors shortly after the meeting.
On December 15, 2008, the FBI asked for an explanation as to how Madoff’s firm lost $17.5 billion, and he said there was no “innocent explanation” for the loss.
In March 2009, Madoff pled guilty to securities fraud and other charges and he was given a 150-year prison sentence.
In November 2011, The Guardian reported that trader David Kugel admitted to conspiring with Madoff “beginning in the early 1970s through December 2008 to commit securities fraud, falsify records of a broker dealer, and falsify records of an investment adviser,” which was 20 years earlier than Madoff had claimed the fraud began.
In May 2015, Kugel was sentenced 10 months of home detention and 200 hours of community service, per a report from Reuters at the time.
While in prison, Madoff refused to cooperate with authorities and continued to assert that he had acted alone. This was something Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street director Berlinger wanted to show wasn’t the case in his documentary.
In an interview with The Guardian, Berlinger said: “Over time the aura of this story, and how the story was originally reported, and how most people think about the story, is one evil genius who was so charming and manipulative he did all this terrible stuff.
“The reality, which is underreported and a cautionary tale for everybody who has any kind of financial assets in the market, is he got away with it because of a whole cadre of literal co-conspirators or people who should have known better.”
On April 14, 2021, Madoff died from natural causes while serving his 150-year prison sentence, he was 82.
Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street is out on Netflix now.
