MOVIE REVIEW
The Wizard of Lies: DeNiro and Pfeiffer Superb as the Madoffs
The human cost of the Madoff investment scandal was a tragedy.
I just finished watching HBO’s powerful 2107 story about the Bernie Madoff scandal titled The Wizard of Lies. It’s a much better film than the 6.8 rating it received on imdb.com, casting Robert DeNiro and Michelle Pfeiffer as Mr. and Mrs. Madoff and directed by Barry Levinson (Wag the Dog, Bugsy, Good Morning Vietnam, Rain Man).
The actual event sent shock waves through Wall Street and far beyond at a time when several other financial tremors had shaken the economy. That a respected founder of the Nasdaq financial exchange had been running a Ponzi scam for decades was massively inconceivable, yet it happened. People were investing millions in his “investment firm” to consistently obtain double digit returns year over year. Or so they believed.
Here’s what was really happening. When you invested with Madoff, he gave your money to the previous investors as profits.
In other words, as long as money was pouring in, he was paying out, and everything seemed hunky dory. That is, until the crash of 2008 when Congress refused to bail out the banks.
The September crash made people nervous, but when investors wanted to take their money out of…
