Bernard and Ruth Madoff
On the day before his arrest, he told his sons that he only had 200 or 300 million dollars left and he wanted to disperse it to employees and certain favored accounts before he was going to turn himself in. His sons short circuited his plans by turning him in themselves the next day. Now, several weeks after his arrest, he’s mailing a million dollars worth of bling to his sons and vacationing friends – defying a court order that froze his assets. That mailing had cufflinks, expensive watches, and contained a pair of mittens. It was a stupid thing to do, mailing these things. It must have been important to him, like his plan to give bonuses to certain people at the end. His sons turned him in [again]. And then there’s that face – downturned eyes, something between a smirk and a smile that’s neither defiant nor ashamed, almost detached.
The words empathy and sympathy are often confused. empathy is the human capacity to feel the inner experience of another person. sympathy implies a feeling of harmony with another. I have no sympathy for Bernard Madoff. I doubt many do. But I can have snatches of what it might have felt like to be Bernard Madoff. That his fraud was a conscious gambit on his part is unquestioned – he knew what he was doing, and he had to know how it would end. You can sort of see it in this picture plastered all over the Internet [left] – a deep sadness. But it’s not there in the picture with his wife [top] or the head shot [below left].
The mental mechanism called denial is sort of complicated. It involves dealing with something by keeping it out of your mind. What’s complicated is that it doesn’t exactly work. The deteriorating alcoholic knows what’s happening some of the time [when he can’t keep up not seeing it]. The pedophile is aware [no matter how elaborate the internal ruse] that what he’s doing is not okay. It comes and goes like in these pictures. We don’t know how long Madoff has lived with his version of denial, but we do know that it has been a very long time. These end-game acts [the bonuses, the mailed presents] seem to me to be some kind of desperate attempt to feel positively about himself, and the only way he knows how to do that is to give people money or valuable things.
His sons want no part of him – that’s obvious. I expect there are reasons deeper than his financial duplicity that explain their consistent "No" response – turning him in to the S.E.C., refusing to bail him out of jail, reporting his mailing of these expensive trinkets. No matter how consciously he’s pondered how the end might feel, it’s something he couldn’t really know until he got there. Anyone who knew what he was doing is distancing themselves from him like a hot potato. People who suspected are feeling like they were part of this and are also showing him the back of their heads. 
Anyone who knew him but didn’t know of his schemes is in shock and hardly a resource to him. Unless his wife Ruth was a willing confidante all along, she’s no pleasure to be locked up with right now no matter how grand their apartment.
NEW YORK (Reuters) – One of the packages accused swindler Bernard Madoff sent in violation of a court order contained about 13 watches, a diamond necklace and other valuables worth more than $1 million, prosecutors said in court papers released on Wednesday.
Other packages contained diamond Cartier and Tiffany watches as well as a diamond bracelet, gold watch, four diamond brooches and a jade necklace, the government said, offering new details of what they described as Madoff’s attempt to obstruct justice.
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