The End of Normal

by Stephanie Madoff Mack

  The only time I heard any of Ruth’s backstory before 2008 was once while I was visiting the Madoffs at their home in Palm Beach, and Ruth’s older sister, Joan, who lived nearby in Boca Raton, came over to spend the afternoon with us in Ruth’s cabana at the Breakers Hotel. I started asking questions about their upbringing in Far Rockaway. The two daughters of Saul and Sara Alpern had discovered only after their mother’s death that they may have been illegitimate; Sara, it seemed, had been married before, but never legally divorced her first husband. Ruth and Joan said they still hadn’t figured out exactly what had—or hadn’t—happened.

  Though media accounts would describe Ruth as growing up more solidly middle-class than Bernie and his family, Ruth and Joan described themselves as relatively poor. Ruth, however, proved resourceful from an early age. “I made my own clothes,” she confided with a measure of pride. Petite and bubbly, Ruth was just thirteen when she and Bernie spotted each other in the basement rec room where a friend with a jukebox was throwing a party. Bernie was sixteen, a junior in high school; Ruth had just graduated from eighth grade. “He came with a date,” Ruth recounted with a devilish smile, “but he left with me.” She married him when she was eighteen, just two months before her new husband officially launched Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities.

  A razor-sharp wit had always been Ruth’s suit of armor, and she clearly relied on it (as well as the Wellbutrin that she confided her therapist had prescribed) to endure the very public humiliation her husband caused us all. Returning from her first visit to the Metropolitan Correctional Center to see Bernie behind bars, Ruth was cracking jokes about hanging with all the women waiting to see their men in jail—just another well-groomed Park Avenue grandma chilling with her new gangbanger girlfriends. Ruth even spent her sixty-eighth birthday at the jail, describing it merely as “surreal.”

  Ruth broke her six-month public silence about the case only after a federal judge denounced Bernie’s crimes as “extraordinarily evil” and meted out his 150-year sentence. Ruth wasn’t in the courtroom, but sent me an e-mail saying she felt a little ill. I was prepared for what was to be a lifelong sentence, but this is making me really sick. All I really cared about is whether he would be sent to a maximum security and it might be a possibility with this length sentence besides the total shame of it all. I feared this but I didn’t think it would happen.

  She prepared a statement for the media. She wrote it herself, redrafting the ending, by her own account, at least ten times. She asked me to review it before releasing it. I urged her to drop the final paragraph, lest she torpedo any chance she had of rebuilding her own public image.

  Many wonder if I can still love a man who did this and I understand that, she had written. But this is the man, for better or for worse, whom I married forty-nine years ago. How does one discard forty-nine years of a lifetime? My connection to him has been forged through the years and I cannot abandon him.

  After his sentencing, a prison physical revealed high levels of prostate-specific antigens in Bernie’s blood, which prompted Ruth to gleefully speculate that health issues might guarantee her beloved placement in a medium-security prison.

  Prostate cancer, good news! she joked darkly in an e-mail.

  I hate to say it, but it is probably the best thing that could happen to him, I answered, hastening to add that a high PSA didn’t necessarily mean cancer, anyway.

  At least Bernie had a place to stay, which is more than he left his loyal wife. All four Madoff homes and their contents were being auctioned, with proceeds going to the victims’ fund. U.S. marshals sold off everything from diamonds to dust mops. Even Bernie’s boxer shorts would go on the block, fetching a couple of hundred dollars. Some questionable hype was used to advertise certain items in the sales catalog: A 10.5 karat emerald-cut diamond valued at $550,000 and described as Ruth’s “engagement ring” was a mystery to me, for example. I’d never seen it before, and there’s no way Bernie, at twenty-two, could have purchased it for his teenaged fiancée. Ruth usually sported a simple gold or platinum band, and favored a gorgeous emerald ring when she was dressing up for a special event—the same one she had wrapped in a wad of tissue and mailed to us following Bernie’s arrest.

  A week before she was forced out of the penthouse she and Bernie had called home for nearly twenty-five years, Ruth still wasn’t sure what possessions were considered hers and what was going to be confiscated. I don’t know what I can take, she fretted. They’re going to take all the furniture, my good clothes, shoes, purses, etc., and I’ll have to buy back anything of value that I want to take. I don’t even know if I can take my computer or even one TV set. All Madoff assets were frozen, and though she had not been criminally charged, Ruth was still forced to report any expenditure over $100 to the court-appointed trustees. On the day she was forced to vacate the penthouse with the few boxes of basic necessities she was allowed to keep, Ruth hid in the trunk of a car and had her building superintendent drive her away so she wouldn’t have to face the media waiting outside to witness her humiliating eviction. She had tried in vain to hold on to $69 million in assets her lawyers claimed were unrelated to the fraud, and ended up settling for $2.5 million, which immediately became the target of civil lawsuits from investors who had been defrauded.

  Ruth spent the summer with relatives in Long Island and Florida, then scoured the city for a decent one- or two-bedroom apartment to rent that fall, but leases fell through as soon as landlords discovered the identity of their prospective tenant. I went with her and her broker to look at some places. We would trek up four flights of stairs to some dingy apartment with a hot plate instead of a stove and curtains drooping off a broken rod, and she would shake her head in disgust and disbelief at how much money even a dump commanded in Manhattan. “I just can’t,” she would say. “It’s so depressing.” There was one studio with a ladder leading to a sleeping loft that might have been suitable for a college kid, but was hardly feasible for a woman approaching seventy, and another that Ruth rejected because there was no counter space for her makeup mirror in the tiny bathroom.

  I urged her to look downtown so she could be closer to us, though Mark later admitted to me that he wasn’t too keen on that idea. She was such a target for paparazzi, and so widely recognized by then, that he worried about her picking Audrey up from school or taking her to a neighborhood park. It didn’t matter, anyway; no landlord downtown was willing to accept Ruth’s application, either. There was no way she was going to pass anyone’s background check. “I’m being blackballed by the New York Jewish real-estate community,” she wailed. “Bernie had a lot of important real-estate people that were hurt, and they put the word out, Don’t rent to Ruth Madoff. And no one will. I’m hanging by a thread here.”

  Desperate to shake the tabloid vultures who stalked her, Ruth initially tried to disguise herself with a brown pageboy wig with girlish bangs, which she found at a Hasidic yard sale in Long Island. She sent us a photo her sister had taken of her wearing it, looking for all the world like an aged and forgotten Spice Girl. Later attempts to dye her hair brown or red were less ridiculous. Once her maiden name became known and was no longer a reliable alias, Ruth chose a new one: Jane Green. That she named herself after the color of money was not an irony lost on me, but who knows whether she was trying to be funny or just didn’t think first.

  Jane Green became a nomad dependent on the charity of others, including those her husband had ruined. For months on end, Ruth bounced between the homes of her sister, a niece, and the few friends who hadn’t shunned her. She had once boasted a tight circle of four girlfriends who did everything together, including an African safari, but Bernie had cleaned out those couples, too. I had met and greatly enjoyed Ruth’s lively little posse, and was surprised and touched one afternoon when I answered my phone to hear one of them calling “just to check in on you.” An instant later, the woman was screaming at me: “We have nothing! We’re having
to split roast chicken from Publix for dinner. My granddaughters are going to public school and I’m worried sick they’ll be bullied. My husband and I are old. We can’t get jobs. We got nothing. At least you and Mark are young and have the rest of your life ahead of you!” I hung up, wondering whether Ruth was getting a daily dose of the same vitriol. She hadn’t changed her cell phone number since the arrest.

  For Mark and me, the Bernie backlash was more subtle, but still hurtful. I found myself excluded from the bridal party of one of my old Breakfast Club friends, and passed over as godmother by another. People who had once bragged about knowing a Madoff son and daughter-in-law suddenly were embarrassed to acknowledge us. I learned quickly who my real friends were, and held them close. I was going to need them more than ever to get through what was yet to come. My parents had been ripped off by Bernie, but fortunately, none of my friends had been victimized.

  I have to be in hiding wherever I am, and it’s intolerable, Ruth wrote me from her sister’s in Boca Raton, where Joan and her husband stayed afloat by driving an airport shuttle cab after their retirement nest egg had been wiped out by Bernie. I can’t use my name anywhere and it all becomes so complicated with airplane travel, car rental, etc. She talked about legally changing her name once things quieted down. (Divorcing Bernie, however, was never mentioned.)

  Although Mark and I never experienced the ostracism Ruth did, I was eager to shed the Madoff name by then. Mark fully supported the decision and planned to do the same as soon as his lawyers gave the go-ahead. We liked trying on different possibilities. Mark and our friend Joe were big fans of Dexter, the TV drama about a forensic analyst who moonlights as a serial killer targeting murderers. “Oh, hey,” Mark casually mentioned while watching the show one night, “Joe and I were talking and thought: ‘Stephanie Morgan.’”

  “That sounds good,” I agreed, thinking I’d much rather bear the surname of a fictional serial killer than a real-life con artist.

  “Well, sit with it a little while,” Mark suggested. I did, for several months, then had my attorney file the sealed documents requesting the name change for myself, Audrey, and Nicholas. It was a saddening move: Mark and I were both old-fashioned about a wife taking her husband’s name, and I had been so proud to be Mrs. Mark Madoff. I loved him and wanted the world to know I belonged to him. Even though we were in full agreement about the change and Mark intended to follow suit, it still felt as if we were losing part of our identity as a couple. I just wished I could change my birthday, as well; I share the date with Bernie.

  The afternoon my petition was filed, I was killing time before going to a friend’s house for dinner when Mark texted me: Name was leaked, NY Post outside building. The order, I learned later, had been stolen off the judge’s desk while the judge was at a doctor’s appointment. The judge called my attorney, appalled and apologetic, and told me to pick a new name. He would take the paperwork home and hand-carry it to chambers the next morning. I hastily settled on Mack, which combined my husband’s first initial with the airport code for our favorite place, Nantucket.

  “That’s genius!” Mark approved. “I love it.” I felt a twinge of guilt when I realized that he would someday have to become Mark Mack, which sounded like a comic-strip detective, but I knew he would be as relieved as I was to no longer carry the most shameful name in America. I couldn’t even stand to see it on old prescription bottles in my medicine cabinet, or have a salesclerk notice it on my credit card. Mark and I had both cringed when we had to wear nametags while mingling with other parents and teachers at preschool open houses while looking for a place to enroll Audrey just months after Bernie’s arrest. Thank God everyone was gracious enough not to ask us if we were those Madoffs.

  Our worst incident was probably the insensitive phone call we got from the director of Pinecliffe, the summer camp Kate had attended in Maine for several years. To accommodate divorced parents, the camp sets aside two visiting days per season. The mother of another camper with family ties to the New York Mets—a major investor in Bernie’s fraudulent fund—had demanded that we not show up on the same day she was visiting her daughter. I was sickened at the thought that poor Kate might have been subjected to any trickle-down cruelty, but she seemed fine when we went to visit. Around us, the kids never brought up Papa Bernie and what he had done.

  Even with supportive friends, though, there was always a certain undercurrent of embarrassment for us. We could be out to dinner with other couples, having a good time, but I always wondered afterward whether the conversation shifted once we left the table. Do you think they knew? Are they going to lose their apartment? Is everything they own basically stolen?

  But the most difficult relationship of all to navigate was the one between Mark and his mother. Mark never asked for any details about my post-arrest relationship with Ruth, and while he seemed grateful that I was trying to look after her, he still struggled to work through his own conflicted feelings. His lawyers’ initial advice to keep his distance gave him the perfect excuse to avoid the difficult task of deciding whether his relationship with Ruth could be salvaged. He didn’t flat-out hate her the way he did Bernie, but from the beginning, he found her continued devotion to a man who had caused so much pain to so many—most of all, to his own family—infuriating. His dismay deepened when she continued to hold fast to her destructive marriage even after Bernie had been transferred to North Carolina to spend the rest of his life locked up. She refused to see what she was doing to her sons even when old friends spelled it out, as Bernie’s longtime secretary did for a Vanity Fair reporter.

  Eleanor says that I gave up my children to see Bernie, Ruth complained to me in an e-mail when the magazine piece appeared. It’s not one or the other, she insisted, though her older son, at least, had made it crystal clear to her that it was. I feel so sorry for him, she added, meaning, of course, Bernie. He must have suffered so during his life . . . I know he didn’t get into this because of greed or to thoughtlessly hurt anyone. Why he did, then, she didn’t explain.

  Having cut off their father completely and their mother almost entirely save for brief e-mail exchanges, the Madoff brothers were at odds with each other as well in the middle of the firestorm that still raged around them. Mark and Andy had gone from working side by side every day of their adult lives and spending vacations fishing together to speaking only when they met at the offices of the legal team they shared. Petty grievances festered into deep wounds. Andy’s girlfriend, Catherine, invariably seemed to be a factor. He had introduced her to the rest of the family several months before Bernie’s arrest, to less-than-enthusiastic reviews. Eager to welcome her into the fold early on, I had met her for coffee at Balthazar, a nearby SoHo restaurant. “I’m curious to know what you think of her,” Mark said beforehand.

  I came home convinced that we’d clicked and that I had just made a wonderful new friend. “I think she’s great,” I gushed to Mark. “I liked her a lot.”

  “Just be careful, Stephanie,” he cautioned. “There’s something weird about her. Something I just find off.” It was unusual for him to sound an alarm like that, but I brushed his concern aside.

  Soon enough, though, Mark’s instincts were borne out, and we both got the impression that Catherine was trying a little too desperately to muscle her way into the Madoff family, whether it was angling for exclusive use of a company driver or leaping at the chance to join Bernie and Ruth on vacation in the south of France. I secretly envied her confidence and the way she simply claimed the status she wanted, which was something I still wrestled with even several years and one grandchild into my marriage. For Mark, the last straw was when Catherine invited herself along on a guys-only fishing tournament he and Andy had entered with some buddies. Mark threw a fit and she stayed away, but the incident spoiled the trip. My wake-up came seven months before Bernie’s arrest, on Mother’s Day. We had all gone out for a celebratory dinner the night before—Mark, Audrey, and me,
Andy and Catherine, the Madoffs, my parents, and my brother and sister-in-law. I had given Ruth a necklace with a silver macaroni charm from Audrey.

  “Thank you for the beautiful flowers,” Ruth said when she called the next day.

  “I didn’t send you flowers,” I said, puzzled.

  “It says you did on the card,” Ruth replied, equally puzzled. She read it to me: Thought you might need a buttering-up from the women who adore your sons. Since there were only two sons, and two women, that left only one possible suspect: Andy’s girlfriend. Catherine’s presumptuousness ticked me off, but I was also mortified by the juvenile message on the card. I would never say something so cheesy, nor would I piggyback onto someone else’s gift. If I wanted to send Ruth flowers, I would do so on my own. I sent an e-mail to Catherine, copying Mark and Andy: It would’ve been nice if you had told me you were going to send flowers to Ruth from me, I said. Mark soon called me from the office.

  “Stephanie, this Mother’s Day thing with the flowers is out of control,” he said. “She’s saying she didn’t send flowers from both of you, just her.”

  “But your mother read me the card,” I protested, recounting the message to him. This was getting ludicrous. It wasn’t The Da Vinci Code.

  Mark went back to Andy, who was now going by “Andrew” at Catherine’s behest, and the denials grew even more vehement: The florist must have transcribed the card wrong. By now, unfortunately, Mark’s love of TV cop shows and Vince Flynn thrillers was getting the best of him, and he decided to play sleuth. He contacted the florist and got him to forward the e-mail order, which did, in fact, identify Catherine Hooper as the person who had placed it, spelling out the message she wanted on the card. The wording was exactly as Ruth had relayed it to me.

  Mark triumphantly confronted Andy with proof of the floral felony. A huge, stupid blowup ensued, and for the first time Mark could remember, a rift formed between the brothers. Andy was deeply hurt and confused. He was in love; why couldn’t his brother just be happy for him? Catherine phoned Mark at work, calling him a pathetic loser and telling him to fuck off and stop trying to ruin her relationship. “She was going crazy,” he told me, laughing. A month later, she boycotted what would turn out to be the final Madoff party in Montauk and let it be known it was because she felt unwanted. Andy spent the weekend sulking, his anger sucking the oxygen out of the house. He and Mark barely spoke. Ruth and Bernie were upset, exchanging occasional worried looks but making no attempt to mediate. They had never seen this kind of tension between their two boys. “She makes me very nervous,” Bernie remarked about Catherine when Andy was out of earshot.