I am not exactly sure why some critics found the new Netflix docu-series about Madoff’s deposition too glitzy to watch: there is nothing in it that would suggest adoration towards Bernie Madoff as an exceptionally great evil mastermind. Yet the Guardian writer (mind you, an occupation that speaks for itself) exposed the filmmakers of the documentary as those who made a bombastic show out of the disgraced financier’s troubled activities, although they didn’t bother to call him a “mediocre arsehole” even once.
Or should they? Because the whole 4 episodes of the documentary have shown exactly that—a transgression of not a remarkable, not an outstanding, but just a relatively smart, active, abrasive and borderline sociopathic man to his dubious fame that ended up in a staggering downfall.
I must admit that I am far from being even remotely close to understanding how exactly the financial market works: if there is a sphere out there that is a complete terra incognita for me, the stock market would be exactly that. Yet even I understand that once you decide to make a Ponzi scheme, you are up to no good, and to obtain this knowledge you don’t need a degree from Harvard Business School. What I find the most fascinating in Madoff’s wrongdoings that the documentary slowly unfolds (unlike the aforementioned Guardian critic, I don’t mind a slo-mo impersonation of Madoff himself and his accomplices on the screen either) is how extremely lucky he was: his firm had been scrutinised by SEC bureaucrats not just once, but multiple times, yet every time there was a way, however unlikely, for him to escape: basically, had they looked through his documentation just ever slightly more carefully, he would’ve been caught almost nine years earlier, and this is crazy.
His audacity was indeed shocking: did he know that doom was coming? Of course, he did: he wasn’t an idiot. But it is also apparent that, but for the 2008 market crash, his crimes and his lavish life in a deranged world of “above the 17th floor*” would have lasted longer. How much longer exactly? Nobody knows: one can only speculate.
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* According to the court documents, the 17th floor of the Lipstick Building (a skyscraper on Third Avenue in Midtown Manhattan), where the brokerage firm “Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities” was headquartered, was the exact place where Madoff carried out his Ponzi scheme
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