On Monday, Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison. He ran one of the biggest investor frauds in Wall Street history which spanned two decades and ran up to $65 billion dollars. Now that Madoff will be spending the rest of his life in jail, details of his life--his high school sweethearts, his personal quirks, his moody demeanor--are coming out of the woodworks in countless blog posts and articles.
I have learned that Madoff was obsessively clean, and that every single piece of furniture in his building--including the push pins--were black, gray or white. I have also learned that Madoff was a lifeguard in high school and ran a side business installing sprinklers in his neighbors' lawns. For the truly schadenfreude junkies, several articles have written lurid speculations for the type of prison Madoff will probably go to, the kind of violent offenders he will be surrounded by, and the 300 telephone minutes he will get every month.
This is all mildly fascinating yet useless information. But what about the victims? What are we doing for the victims?
Let's hear more about the victims--or shall we say, survivors of Madoff's terrible, horrible Ponzi scheme. The handful of personal accounts that have been shared with the public by the press have been nothing less of heartbreaking. Families wrote of being robbed of their basic freedom to live a simple, comfortable life, as they now depend on food stamps, working two or three jobs, and scavenging the dumpster just to survive. Elderly couples who have been saving up for their golden years since early youth described how they woke up one day to find that their entire retirement funds have vanished. One woman even had Bernie Madoff himself pat her on the shoulder and tell her with utmost sincerity that the family investments were safe with him at her father's funeral.
Bernie Madoff may never see the light of day again. Thank God for that. But when the victims continue to suffer to this very moment for putting their financial trust in a man like Bernie Madoff, we as a society cannot exactly say that justice has been rightfully served.
Thankfully, true expressions of human dignity are emerging from this undignified financial fraud. As detailed in this inspirational TIME article, at least one victim is using this hardship as a motivation to fight harder to make improvements in government policy and the financial sector so that such frauds will not occur again on this scale.
Elie Wiesel's Foundation for Humanity, one of the many non-profit organizations hit hard by the fraud, released a statement that all of us need to remember: "The values we stand for are more needed than ever ... We shall not be deterred from our mission to combat indifference, intolerance and injustice around the world."
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