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A case like Bernard Madoff's calls for justice

Madoff's fraud was an attack on the idea of trust

David Greising

March 13, 2009

Anyone who has visited the old federal courthouse in Fort Smith, Ark., can't help but remember the re-created gallows that exist where Judge Isaac Parker, "The Hanging Judge," sent 79 frontier outlaws to their deaths in the late 1800s.

Some 5,000 people came in 1875 to watch Parker's first death sentence meted out on six condemned killers. Newspapers from New York and Boston joined those from Chicago, St. Louis and Fort Smith to cover the event.

The atmosphere outside the federal courthouse in New York on Thursday, beamed via cable coverage to TVs around the world, shows that our curiosity about villainy, our desire to watch the wicked come to justice, is as alive now as then.

This is all very human. When a criminal on the scale of Bernard Madoff is held to account for his crimes, we, too, should take account of what went wrong, and what it means.

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Madoff was the epitome of the silk-stockinged, upper-East-Side- Manhattan, moneyed aristocracy.

Moving from wealthy heir to power broker to movie producer to politician, using his Jewish identity not as a point of human connection but as a way to disarm his marks, he steadily, stealthily, took down his prey.

Many victims, rightly, had complained that Madoff was biding time in a swank New York mansion-in-the-sky while waiting for justice to grind its wheels. On Thursday, he became chaff in those wheels, a prisoner at last and, one must hope, a prisoner for good.

It might be easy for some to look at Madoff's crimes as a lesser sort of criminality because he "only" stole money, and thieved only from the very wealthy. It is no accident that police detectives break down their work into property crimes and violent crimes. Our society sees mere theft as somehow less criminal than a beating.

A case such as Madoff's shows us that such distinctions completely miss the point.

Madoff betrayed his kind with the soulless viciousness of a thug. He concealed the evidence with the calculating cruelty of a murderer. He wreaked as much heartbreak and havoc as the arsonists who set Southern California or Australia afire.

The scale of Madoff's wreckage is almost unimaginable: $65 billion. He stole the inheritances of thousands. He attacked foundations that do everything from fight AIDS to teach the disabled to keep memories of the Holocaust alive. Factory workers' pension funds, college endowments and city trustees all are among his victims.

Madoff's crime is bigger even than that. University of Southern California law professor Lynn Stout sees it as an attack on one of the basic underpinnings of our economic system: the idea of trust.

"When someone masterminds a fraud on this outrageous scale, it not only harms the individual victims. It harms the markets that are the engine of economic growth in our country," Stout said.

"This kind of behavior is perhaps the gravest sort of threat there is to the functioning of our financial markets."

A credit squeeze, bank failures, mortgage meltdowns and balky bailouts are already undermining the markets. Now Madoff comes along and makes it all worse.

Justice will render judgment on Madoff. If there is justice, he should spend all his remaining days behind bars.

Now the question is whether Madoff deserves forgiveness. Elie Wiesel, the noted Holocaust victim and humanist, has said Madoff does not deserve forgiveness. Madoff has showed little contrition, for starters. But Wiesel also seems to believe some crimes are so great, that forgiveness must be withheld. Compassion and understanding, yes, but not forgiveness.

Madoff has visited a financial plague on his victims unrivaled in history. Forgiveness, frankly, is not for us to decide. But justice is, and there is no amount of punishment too great for the crime Madoff has perpetrated—on individual victims, and on the markets too.