Chapter 7: Deviance

I chose this chapter on deviance because of the topic of "elite crime". We obviously live in a world where crime happens everyday and most of those people who commit those crimes get punished. However, why is it that when white, upper class, men commit crimes, they are able to get away? While reading the chapter on deviance I was particularly upset to find out that a one Mr. Bernard Madoff, conducted one of the biggest and most famous Ponzi scheme of all time. Because of his stupidity, some of his clients took their lives because they simply could not digest that they had lost all of their assets, including his own son.

An article I found interesting was in the New York Times. This link will take you to that article. One of the statements that the author wrote that struck me about Mr. Madoff was in regards to who really was Bernard Madoff, since he was so two-faced, "An easy answer is that Mr. Madoff was a charlatan of epic proportions, a greedy manipulator so hungry to accumulate wealth that he did not care whom he hurt to get what he wanted." (Creswell, 2009) This just hits the nail on the head for Bernard Madoff. He was so hungry for money, he hurt so many families in the process. And for what? Now he sits in jail for 150 years, owing his debt to society. In this same article Creswell goes on to talk about his employees, "Some employees are said to have given Mr. Madoff a large portion of their life savings - all of which now appears to be gone" (2009).

The most sick side of Mr. Madoff was his mind, "some forensic psychologists see some similarities between him and serial killers like Ted Bundy. They say that wheras Mr. Bundy murdered people, Mr. Madoff murdered wallets, bank account and people's sens of finiancial trust and security." (Creswell, 2009)

After watching this video, this is why I am so irrate and I can only imagine what the people who are most affected are feeling. This video, from ABC's 20/20, Brian Ross states, "while Mr. Madoff sits in his cozy Manahattan home, others that he took from have already had to sell their homes." How awful for those people! I find it bizarre as well, that not everyone in his family had no idea. One gentleman that Brian Ross interviewed said that it is just like an airplane pilot: "I am a passenger on an airplane, well no your not you are a passenger but you have a responsibility as well." (2009). In the second part of this video from 20/20, they interview very wealthy people who put their investments in with Bernard Madoff, they trusted him, they liked him. Many of his clients were friends of his from the Palm Beach area. After he was arrested, his Palm Beach home was vandalized. Since Mr. Madoff was Jewish, many of his clients were Jewish, and most of his clients had to be Jewish for Madoff to invest with him. On part three on this series on 20/20, they talk about how Ruth Madoff, Bernard's wife, wants money that she claims is her money and confesses she knows nothing about his scheme.

Even now people are starting to write books about how they lost everything. One of Bernard Madoff's sons, Mark, attempted to kill himself on the second anniversary of his father's arrest. His wife took their daughter to Disneyland to try to escape the nightmare they were living in, when she came home she was now a widow. She wrote a book, "The End of Normal: A Wife's Anguish, A Widow's New Life" by Stephanie Madoff. This website talks about that.

Another website, short and sweet, talks about what his company name was, when he began his career and when it ended. It states that he "plead guility to 11 felony counts on March 12,2009 and was sentenced on June 29, 2009, to the maximum sentence of 150 years behind bars." (The Wall Street Journal, n.d)

One of my favorite quotes was from the first video from ABC's 20/20: "He's at home, not in jail, in his multi-million dollar Manhattan apartment, in his designer decorated den. To the outrage of his victims who are on the verge of foreclosure, ruin and possibly suicide. Some of them have already have had to foreclose , while Mr. Madoff lives under luxury house arrest." (2009)

A quote that makes me think about this whole matter is from a song by Smashmouth: "Your brain gets smart, but your head gets dumb." Bernie Madoff is not a stupid man, but he is. He was dumb enough to do something that took advantage of people he cared about, he got caught because he was dumb and now he will be paying for it. People like Bernie Madoff are very smart, meticlous, obessive complusive people, if only he took that energy and used it to benefit others and not himself, he chose the opposite. Who can we trust?