His evil deeds, in their afterlife, are now serving as a recurring wave of financial body scans. Each new Madoff revelation sheds light on an entire culture that allowed far loftier flimflams than his to succeed — though the loftier culprits, unlike him, usually escaped with the proceeds. That financial culture largely remains in place today.
The prime mover in connecting Madoff’s low-tech, relatively low-yield scam to the big Wall Street picture is Irving H. Picard, the bankruptcy trustee pursuing loss claims for Madoff’s victims. Most Americans haven’t heard of Picard. But each day that he accelerates his pursuit of Madoff’s collaborators, he steps further into the vacuum of leadership left by others, including the Obama administration’s Department of Justice.
Picard has also upstaged the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that is set to officially close its doors today. The hope had been that the commission, convened by Congress, would be what Ferdinand Pecora’s Senate inquisition of 1933 was to the Great Crash — a no-holds-barred dispensation of blame to tycoons who looted the Wall Street casino and then let ordinary Americans pay the consequences. Pecora’s cross-examination of Charles Mitchell, the chairman of National City Bank (the ancestor of Citigroup), caused a national sensation. But in its final report, our own Great Recession’s commission essentially found everyone guilty, thereby letting individual miscreants off the hook.
And so Madoff remains the only felon of the whole affair that Americans can identify by name. By taking this single card he’s been dealt and exploiting Madoff’s trail of crime to the max, Picard may yet prove the Pecora we’ve been waiting for.
Full article here: At Last, Bernie Madoff Gives Back – NYTimes.com.
