Series Review: "Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street" (2023).

From the director of Conversations with a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes comes Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street. This documentary series directed by Joe Berlinger. The series reveals the truth behind Bernie Madoff’s infamous multibillion-dollar global Ponzi scheme and the ways in which a willfully blind financial system allowed it to flourish for decades.

On April 29, 1938, American fraudster and financier who was the mastermind of the largest Ponzi scheme in history, worth about $64.8 billion, Bernard Lawrence Madoff was born. He was at one time chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange. He advanced the proliferation of electronic trading platforms and the concept of payment for order flow. Madoff's firm had two basic units: a stock brokerage and an asset management business; the Ponzi scheme was centered in the asset management business. In 1960, Madoff founded a penny stock brokerage, which eventually grew into Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities. He served as the company's chairman until his arrest on December 11, 2008. That year, the firm was the 6th-largest market maker in S&P 500 stocks. While the stock brokerage part of the business had a public profile, Madoff tried to keep his asset management business low profile and exclusive. In early December 2008, Madoff's sons Mark and Andrew told authorities that their father had confessed to them that the asset management unit of his firm was a massive Ponzi scheme, and quoted him as saying that it was "one big lie". The following day, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Madoff and charged him with one count of securities fraud. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission(SEC) had previously conducted multiple investigations into his business practices but had not uncovered the massive fraud. On March 12, 2009, Madoff pleaded guilty to eleven federal felonies and admitted to turning his wealth management business into a massive Ponzi scheme. On June 29, 2009, Madoff was sentenced to one hundred and fifty years in prison, the maximum sentence allowed. The Madoff investment scandal defrauded thousands of investors of billions of dollars. Those charged with recovering the missing money believe that the investment operation may never have been legitimate. The amount missing from client accounts was almost $65 billion, including fabricated gains. The Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC) trustee estimated actual losses to investors of $18 billion, of which $14.418 billion has been recovered and returned, while the search for additional funds continues. On April 14, 2021, he died at the Federal Medical Center, Butner, in North Carolina, from chronic kidney disease.

It seems the events are too recent for the documentary to do an excruciating journalistic job. But it serves as a much needed platform for the victims. These types of documentaries make everything unsurprising. They tell their stories boldly and more, but what truly resonates throughout the four-part documentary is the complicity of government agencies and officials. Madoff's illegal acts are fit for the 'true crime' formula by Netflix. And this series guarantees a full exposure, even when we realize it could have been better.

Simon says Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street receives:

Also, see my review for Conversations with a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes.