How Bernie Madoff with Billions

NEW YORK- The mood in the courtroom was savage.  A throng of the the curious and more intimately involved massed and then swelled forward.  All to be the first to learn the measure of fate that had to be meted out today.  Judge Oliver Wendall Homeless did not disappoint.  Without ceremony, or an accounting of wrongs committed, the words 150 years escaped the Judge’s lips and could not be returned to the gate of mouth.  Bernie Madoff looked on stoically.  His face betrayed neither the relief nor the consternation that trickled all throughout the murmuring crowd.

Madoff, as many a Vitamin Press reader is bound to remember, is a white collar criminal who bilked hundreds of billions out of his clients.  His scheme started off simply and never graduated very far beyond that.  He convinced a few investors to commit a lifetimes worth of roughly 13 percent of their wages to his company. Those investors were tasked with finding new investors and from the new revenues of the new investors the money was divided and a party was had.  The next day there was no money left over but plenty of ambition remained.  New investors were found and the last couple of sentences repeated themselves over and over again for a very long time.  And then one day the baby boomers retired and a whole lot of us got screwed.