The End of Normal by Stephanie Madoff Mack

For Voyeurs Like Me

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Voyeurism is the word that best describes my reason for reading this book from 2011. The author is the second wife of Bernie Madoff’s older son, Mark, who committed suicide on December 11, 2010, the second anniversary of his father’s arrest.

As a reminder, Bernie Madoff was a Wall Street investment advisor who became world-famous when the FBI and the SEC uncovered the Ponzi scheme he had been operating for almost 20 years. According to an article in the New York Times, there were “paper losses of almost $65 billion, cash losses of about $17 billion and tens of thousands of victims ranging from Swiss private bankers to labor union pension funds to notable charities and universities.”

Here are the bare-bones of the book. Please read it to fill in all the tragic details:

• Bernie and Ruth Madoff had two sons, Mark and Andrew.
• Both sons worked for their father as Senior Managers, but claimed their division of the investment firm was totally separate from their father’s division. They said they had no knowledge of their father’s fraudulent activities.
• When their father confessed to them and their mother that his empire was all one big lie, Mark and Andrew turned their father in to the authorities.
• At the time this occurred, Stephanie and Mark had been married for four years. They had a two-year-old daughter, Audrey, and Stephanie was seven months pregnant with her son Nicholas.
• That Mark and Andrew turned their father in is the biggest proof the author has to the innocence of her husband and brother-in-law.
• Of course, the authorities and the press needed more proof than that and the brothers, as suspects, were frequently in the news.
• This was horrifically difficult for Mark.
• Beyond this, Mark was distraught that his mother did not end her relationship with Bernie. He issued an ultimatum: “Ruth had to choose. She would have to sever all ties with Bernie and publicly divorce him, or be cut off completely by Mark.”
• Ruth chose Bernie.
• Mark attempted suicide using Ambien and Lorazepam, but survived and was admitted to a psych ward.
• Stephanie thought he was doing well in the months after his release from the hospital and so she and her mother took Audrey to Disney World for her 4^th birthday. Mark stayed home with Nicholas.
• While she was away a Wall Street Journal article with the headline “Madoff’s Kin Eyed as Probe Grinds On” came out and unhinged Mark.
• Stephanie writes that Mark’s response “infuriated” her. It was “a rehash of old news” and here he was “[disappearing] down the dark rabbit hole again.” Her text message back to him was, “I CANNOT TAKE THIS ANYMORE!!!!” With that, she turned off her phone.
• And with that, Mark hanged himself, while his young son slept in another room.

I have sympathy for Mark as I would for any person desperate enough to kill himself. And I have sympathy for Stephanie not only for the loss of her husband but for these explicit details that place some blame for it on herself.

But then I step back a bit and notice that Mark died December 11, 2010 and the hardback version of the book came out October 11, 2011. It was written “with Tamara Jones,” so a ghost writer helped. But even so, what was the rush to get the book out so quickly?

I guess she wanted to capitalize on the interest of voyeurs like me to make as much money as possible.

This embarrasses me to recognize my part in this book’s publication, but then the Bernie Madoff story intrigues me and I continue to follow it.

Thus I found this very interesting: the Netflix documentary, Madoff, the Monster of Wall Street.

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