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Swindler's list in Brookline
By adamg on Sat, 02/07/2009 - 11:22am
Wicked Local Brookline posts a list of Madoff's victims in the town.
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Comments
Communities
A lot of people and organizations got screwed by this.
But another thing that's bad about this is how it appears that the Jewish ties were used as part of the swindle. A lot of people identify with particular groups, especially ethnic ones, and to form business networks within those groups. Business within these groups furthers the group itself. Ethnic groups will also often have religious components, which can be additionally reassuring as to values, even if a particular member of the group is not very observant. In the case of Jews, Judaism seems big on ethics -- a hard set of rules, and a practice of reasoning intelligently about them. I suspect many victims were swindled because the Jewish connections made them much more trusting and complacent than they'd otherwise be. And a trusting community being betrayed is sad, in addition to all the other impact of the swindle.
Madoff fraud hurts Somerville, too
The Somerviille News published an article this week about the effect of Madoff's fraud on local Somerville organizations, namely YouthBuild USA and the Somerville Arts Council.
Also, Tufts University lost $20 million in this scam.
Madoff sounds like a rather scary guy!
It's horrible that so many people were taken with his charisma and failed to realize that Madoff would screw them later. It would be nice if he were made to pay restitution to his victims, which were many, by making him refund their hard-earned, hard-invested money to them.
That would be impossible
In a Ponzi scheme, most of the money that came in went right back out to pay earlier investors. He doesn't have all of the money squirreled away somewhere that the Feds can seize to pay it all back.
The best the victims can do at this point is to recover a small percentage of their investments from the receiver.