Posted on 02/27/2011 7:16:44 PM PST by kcvl
Bernard L. Madoff is in therapy. Each week, he waits for the signal that prisoners are allowed to leave their housing units, then he walks the five minutes from his “room,” as he calls it, to the psychiatric unit at the Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, North Carolina, where he can unburden himself. The sessions are often teary.
“How could I have done this?” he asks. “I was making a lot of money. I didn’t need the money. [Am I] a flawed character?”
In some ways, Madoff has not tried to evade blame. He has made a full confession, telling me again and again that nothing justifies what he did. And yet, for Madoff, that doesn’t settle the matter. He feels misunderstood. He can’t bear the thought that people think he’s evil. “I’m not the kind of person I’m being portrayed as,” he told me.
And so, sitting alone with his therapist, in the prison khakis he irons himself, he seeks reassurance. “Everybody on the outside kept claiming I was a sociopath,” Madoff told her one day. “I asked her, ‘Am I a sociopath?’ ” He waited expectantly, his eyelids squeezing open and shut, that famous tic. “She said, ‘You’re absolutely not a sociopath. You have morals. You have remorse.’ ” Madoff paused as he related this. His voice settled. He said to me, “I am a good person.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nymag.com ...
Blah blah blah. He doesn’t need a psychobabbler. He needs to confess his sins and accept forgiveness for them.
It’s easy to have remorse when you are in prison.
Bernie:
No you didn’t need the money, you wanted the money - so you could spend it on stuff. But it wasn’t yours and you’re a criminal because you stole it from other people.
Deep down you’ll find that you’re dishonest.
In the eighties, he said, he produced consistent returns of 15 to 20 percent, and he insists he did it legally. (The trustee representing Madoff victims says he can’t find records that Madoff ever traded, though the records are incomplete.) By the late eighties, he had, he estimates, $3 billion to $4 billion under management.Sounds like his ponzi scheme goes way back... sort of like a private version of social security.
And, like social security, claiming a legitimacy it never had.
What an utter pile of Madoff. Oh. yes, he's got tremendous remorse, remorse that his immorality caught up with him, that he couldn't continue his criminal enterprise. It seems therapy is not about dealing with the truth, only about getting you to feel better about yourself. I'm sure his victims take tremendous solace that he has morals, that he has remorse, that he feels terrible about what happened. So, his therapist doesn't think he's a sociopath. Certainly could never say he isn't a self-absorbed, ego-centric narcissist.
Part of obtaining forgiveness is restitution.
If he does that he should be forgiven.
Well its refreshing to know that along with the one banker at least one therapist is in prison also.
Read the entire article, (which few will) and you might learn something.
How, for example, it is easy to fall. How many others are implicated. How we’ve all been there to one degree or another, mostly penny ante, trivial sins we’ve never paid for. And so on...
Frankly, I don’t give a damn.
He can and will no doubt rot in hell.
She wasn't a sociopath ~ her incentive was relatively sexual in nature.
When Bernie first got his gray hair he no doubt yearned for the good old days and found a way to MAKE IT HAPPEN!
When you follow the story in the article, you see that this is exactly how the Social Security Ponzi scheme developed over the years.
Social Security continues to have a positive balance. You have a couple of major plagues, or maybe a meteor strike, it won't matter.
[Am I] a flawed character? Uh...YEAH!
Am I a Sociopath? Uh,... duh.
NEXT!
The best punishment for this man, as for the Enron Jeff Skilling, rotting at some other Fed camp, would be to force him to make up for his victims using his own money, and you can bet that he (they) could and would in some percentage or another, given their talents and experience!
Madoff is a typical crooked wall street sociopath.....doesn't think he really did anything too bad...
He didn’t do penny ante sins. And, he continues to use the “everyone else was doing it” defense.
What I learned from the article was that he made definitive cruel choices and it bothers me that he now gets to live the rest of his life sponsored by taxpayers.
His mother was running a brokerage firm out of their home. I think the mother and old man got nailed for that by the SEC back in the late 50s or early 1960s.
Oh yeah, bookmark. I’ve been waiting for this one all day.
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