“The carnage will go on for years”
In termsof financial and psychological impact, Bernard Madoff’s $50 billionheist certainly ranks as a major ethnic cleansing here in America, ahugely traumatic event for American Jewry. Of course Madoff had clientsof every creed and nation, but he made a specialty of trolling forJewish money. I asked a Jewish woman I know here in California if anyin her circle had taken a hit. She looked at me tremulously, shakingher head, on the edge of tears. Though no one was in immediate earshot,she whispered, “They kept telling me to put my money with Madoff. Atthat time the entry level was $250,000. I dodged the bullet. Some of myfriends didn’t. They’ve lost everything. This is Kristallnacht Two.” Her fear and horror would scarcely have been diminished if she’d heardwhat a perfectly nice young person had remarked to me earlier, aproposthe Madoff affair:
“Now the rich people will know what it’s like.”
Amongthose apparently taking serious and even financially fatal hits:Yeshiva University in New York; Senator Frank Lautenberg, New York Metsowner Fred Wilpon, real estate and media mogul Mortimer Zuckerman(“significantly hurt”), GMAC Financial Services chairman J. Ezra Merkin(who ran a hedge fund, Ascot Partners, which reinvested many charities’funds with Madoff), the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, StevenSpielberg’s Wunderkinder Foundation, Jeff Katzenberg, the Boston-basedRobert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation (which has closed its doors),Eliot Spitzer’s family, the Chais Family Foundation, the Carl and RuthShapiro Foundation, Hadassah (the Women’s Zionist Organization ofAmerica), the United Jewish Endowment Fund of the Jewish Federation ofGreater Washington , the Los Angeles’ Jewish Community Foundation’s$238 million Common Investment Pool, the American Jewish Congress, theTechnion-Israel Institute of Technology.
It’sa savage body blow to the commercial real estate market in New York.Christine Haughney in Friday’s New York Times quotes Robert J. Ivanhoe,a lawyer who is representing 10 developers and investors who lost $5million to $50 million each, as saying “The level of devastation, bothfinancial and on a human level, is astounding,” Haughney cites aManhattan psychotherapist who counsels real estate leaders and bankersas saying “most of the patients he has seen this week have closefriends and relatives who lost money with Mr. Madoff. The victimsinclude executives at the global commercial brokerage CB Richard Ellis,most prominently Stephen Siegel, a major Bronx landlord who is chairmanof worldwide operations at the brokerage.”