Posted on 01/22/2009 4:43:05 PM PST by Liz
When Maureen Ebel's uncle called her at 10:45 p.m. Dec. 11, she feared a death in the family. Instead, her Uncle Leonard gave Ebel news of another kind of disaster that would upend her life: New York investment manager Bernard L. Madoff had been charged with massive fraud. Ebel, 60, a widow who lives outside West Chester and winters near West Palm Beach, thought she had $7.3 million with Madoff.
It became sickeningly clear over the next day or so that all her money was gone. "The thought that I have to work now as long as I can stand up to feed myself" shattered her comfortable world, she said. Six days after Madoff's arrest for allegedly bilking investors in a $50 billion Ponzi scheme, Ebel had a strenuous temporary job caring for a wealthy friend's 93-year-old mother and keeping her house, pushing the vacuum cleaner and ironing. "The first day, I went home and cried," Ebel said.
Ebel, a retired nurse with blond hair and big blue eyes set on a broad face that turns red with emotion, is no stranger to hard work. She got her first job at age 14. But she believed she had moved on for good. Not so. "This is my fate," said Ebel, who is still pained by her husband's death in 2000, when he was just 53. "I was married, had a fabulous marriage to a man I loved and worshiped, a physician. We traveled. We had a very fine life. And he's dead. He died, and every penny I had in the world has been stolen."
During an interview in the living room of her four-bedroom colonial on a West Goshen Township cul-de-sac, Ebel swung between despair over her losses, anger that Madoff still calls a Manhattan penthouse home after ruining thousands, and determination to build a new life. Her friends are not surprised. "Her attitude is: This is not going to lick me," said Marlene Bezark, a West Conshohocken resident who has known Ebel for 35 years. Ebel, who was born in Philadelphia and has lived in Chester County since she was 6 years old, is making big and small moves to battle back. She listed her Florida condo with a real estate agent and put her Lexus SUV up for sale on eBay, hoping to sell it before the next $690 payment is due Feb. 15.
Selling the two-bedroom condo, which was appraised at $400,000 several years ago, is excruciating because her late husband was so happy there. "It was like a chunk of my husband that I still had," Ebel said. But if the condo fails to sell in the miserable Florida real estate market, she cannot imagine what will happen. To have any hope of making the $2,400-a-month payments on her house in West Chester, she will have to get re-certified as a nurse, go back to work and take in a boarder, said Ebel, speaking with her hands to illustrate her feeling that parts of her body are being torn away.
She has already sold small items to scrape dollars together: a Ping-Pong table from her basement for $400, a painting for $1,500, jewelry for $1,100.
When she got to Florida on Monday to work on selling the condo, she remembered that she could return a $1,300 television to Costco. Already last month, she returned thousands of dollars of items she had paid for with her American Express card, including a $5,400 set of porch furniture bought Dec. 9, a $5,000 club membership, and a $1,200 pair of earrings.
The first time she went to her local Publix supermarket in Florida after Madoff's fraud came out, she had a new experience picking out cream for her coffee. Normally she would take whatever she wanted and put it in the cart, not paying much attention to prices on such a small item. But that time, she looked at the price of every single cream until she spotted a two-for-one sale. "Ah! That's for me," she recalled. Then she came to a big display of two-for-one canned goods. "I'm rooting through the canned goods. What do I eat? Corn, I'll eat that. String beans, I'll eat that. Two-for-one. This is what it is after having had an income of $400,000 a year."
Ebel's uncle, 80, a longtime Madoff investor, got Ebel into Madoff's fund after her husband's death, thinking he was setting her up for life, Ebel said. "At that time, when he got me into Madoff, he had been a Madoff investor for 25 years, and now he's a Madoff investor and broke after 30 years," she said. Ebel invested $4.5 million with Madoff starting in 2003. That was all of her assets except for one $50,000 bond, which she cashed last month.
Ebel kept her monthly statements from Madoff (that, for all the world, look real), collecting each year's in a separate folder. On the outside of each folder Ebel wrote detailed summaries of the statements. "When you look at the statements, which are probably all bogus, you can see that he's just trading blue chips, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Wachovia, Abbott, Pfizer," said Ebel, showing an example from December 2007. "I got one of these every single month, and without fail I got my check every quarter."
In disgust, Ebel flipped through a 6-inch stack of transaction receipts on supposed trades for her account. Ebel, who has registered with the FBI as a Madoff victim and is preparing documents to substantiate a claim, has decided that Madoff is a sociopath. Asked what she would do if she were alone with him, she said: "You can't print it." She has suffered indignities, and kindnesses. She was finally dating someone, but he is gone. "I wasn't the person I was. I got up and went to work everyday," she said. "I was working six days a week, and I'm tired when I get home."
On the other hand, a doctor who treated her for depression after her husband's death found her a sleep aid that costs just $4 a month, Ebel said. Getting a good night's sleep is a relief, but it has not cast off her sense of irreality.
"Down in Florida, I live in this beautiful place, and I feel like an alien walking around. Everyone is going riding their horses and playing tennis, playing golf," Ebel said. "If there's a nickel on the street, I'm picking it up."
Maureen Ebel at home with her dog, Scarlett. She has been scrambling and scrimping as a new reality sets in: "I have to work now as long as I can stand up. Staff photograph by Harold Brubaker.
Maureen Ebel , with receipts from her Madoff dealings, says: "Every penny I had in the world has been stolen." Staff photograph by Harold Brubaker)
I feel bad for her, but investing with Madoff was a choice she made. Who can you trust with investments these days?
Not to mention her $400,000 condo and her Lexus. Just another American sob story in the gathering storm.
What person in her right mind would place all of her money with one person/organization for investing?
I am not without compassion for this woman. But she was seriously dumb (and probably greedy), investing everything she had with Madoff.
Pardon my ignorance but, if you have 7.3 million dollars in an account, why do you have a car payment, mortgage payment and credit card bills?
I cannot imagine but I guess its true, a fool and their money are soon parted?
“Who can you trust with investments these days?”
Well, a lot of people, but if they are promising returns almost double of whatever every other established institution is offering you should be leery. I feel bad for her, but she took a big risk and lost.
She was retired nurse, not a CFA. Madoff looked legit, and people think the government is watching and protecting them.
“why do you have a car payment, mortgage payment and credit card bills?”
If you are earning 12 to 14% on your money it makes total sense to have a mortgage and car payments since the interest on them is less than what you can earn investing (credit card bills make no sense.) This alone should have given her second thoughts.
I would like to know how much she received in disbursements over the years.
This whole situation with Madonna is almost surreal.
I can't believe the guy is still living in his $7 mil. condo and not in jail.
In the article she says she got a check every quarter.
I would like to know how much she received in disbursements over the years.
This whole situation with Madoff is almost surreal.
I can’t believe the guy is still living in his $7 mil. condo and not in jail.
We seem to have more than a few jealous posters on these forums. Honestly earned money is one of the tenets of a good conservative. What we do with our money is another. And lastly if they are robbed of that money ALL true conservatives share in their misery and cry out for justice.
An no I didn’t lose a dime with Madoff.
Most of these "victims" knew what they were getting into. They knew things weren't entirely on the up and up. The biggest mistake they made was misjudging when to pull out. Greed got the best of them.
She's 60. She can go back to work. I know damn well that unless the Lotto god bestows his blessings upon me (and that ain't a part of my financial plans), I'll still be busting my tail at 60.
Yikes, sorry for the wild double post.
Sometimes, spell check is NOT your friend!
You wrote:
“Pardon my ignorance but, if you have 7.3 million dollars in an account, why do you have a car payment, mortgage payment and credit card bills?”
That’s EXACTLY what I said when I saw this article several hours ago. Why would someone with 7.3 million be making house payments YEARS after buying the house? If I was a millionaire, I would just pay cash for the house and car!!!
I feel bad for the lady because she’s been ripped off, but she could have easily avoided this with some common sense.
I agree. I don't see how she doesn't deserve to buy these things with the money she has earned and saved over the years. And at least she is decent enough to return the items and not unduly burden someone else with a loss they didn't deserve.
“...I know damn well that unless the Lotto god bestows his blessings upon me (and that ain’t a part of my financial plans), I’ll still be busting my tail at 60.”
I am working until I am 62 and then some. I have not big retirement plan. Just the Thrift Plan from my government job. I took the slow growth government bonds because I was afraid of the stock market. I was right.
I don't want to be the one to tell her---but under the principle of "fraudulent conveyance" anyone who received disbursements from their Madoff investments has to return the money so that it can be redistributed among all the cheated investors.
Some investors probably never got anything........ just rolled over and reinvested their interest payments. They will be clamoring for money from the ones who got checks.
Feel no sympathy for those with inherited money. They didn’t earn it. Most of those who did, will make it back in no time. Most of these people are relegated to the life most of us have to live. Most of these wealthy gave money to the democrats. The wealthiest districts in the country all vote democratic. They want sympathy? No way. Wait till Obama rips them off.
Bernie Madoff deserves the death penalty. His enablers in congress and the financial business deserve life in prison. Some people who I have no sympathy got hurt, but so did a lot of decent, hard working people.
12/17/08
MADOFF SENT CLIENTS 'DATED' INFO
NY POST, By MARK DeCAMBRE and KAJA WHITEHOUSE
The performance statements that Madoff's firm sent to clients appear riddled with inaccuracies and other suspicious signs that should have raised red flags, according to experts who've reviewed the documents obtained by The Post.
For example, one statement that's part of a Nov. 30 performance report suggests that Madoff's outfit purchased shares of Apple at $100.78 on Nov. 12. However, even when accounting for a usual three-day settlement period, the stock never traded at $100 a share. Its trading range on the day that the shares were supposedly bought was between $90.01 and $92.43, sources noted. Such inaccuracies appear throughout the performance statement.
In another case, the Madoff statement reflects the purchase of Citigroup shares at $12.51 on Nov. 12, even though the stock that day traded in a range between $9.52 and $10.63. "Everything's a couple bucks off," said Jonathon Trugman, founding partner of New York hedge fund Pendulum Capital Management, who reviewed the documents but did not invest with Madoff. "To find something as glaring as the price of Apple stock, what more do you need?" said Trugman.
Others note that Madoff used an outmoded bookkeeping method to record his performance data, and added that his presentation, which lacks details, harkens back to an earlier period before investors demanded more disclosure.
"These look like statements from the mid '90s at the earliest," said New York attorney Ross Intelisano, who's been retained by Madoff clients who've lost money. "If I was [Madoff's] client, I would be very dissatisfied with the quality of the reporting." Added Bob Ellis, a brokerage analyst with research firm Celent, "This is a very bad retail account that doesn't give you very much information. There's hardly any information here about realized or unrealized gains. "None of the other wire-houses or independent firms would have used this old accounting style," he added.
The lack of transparency is surprising since Madoff was considered a friend to regulators and a huge supporter of full disclosure.
One forensic accountant who spoke with The Post said he also noted that Madoff's client statements appear to have been printed using an outdated "impact printer," which haven't been in widespread use since the advent of laser printers. They even pre-date the dot-matrix printers used in the 1990s. "It's just odd for a guy managing $17 billion to being using this sort of technology," the accountant noted.
Others added that one of the more striking red flags to jump out were the deficiencies in Madoff's overall strategy. "You're trying to get above-market returns by buying the bluest of the blue chips, and the truth is the largest of the large-cap stocks move proportionately the least because they have all their information factored into them," Ellis said. "It's just not a strategy that generates above-market returns."
SOURCE http://www.nypost.com/seven/12172008/business/analysts__firm_sent_clients_dated_info_144523.htm
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