From the Herald Tribune:By the end, the world itself was too small to support the vast Ponzi scheme constructed by Bernard Madoff.
Initially, he tapped local money pulled in from country clubs and charity dinners, where investors sought him out to plead with him to manage their savings so they could start reaping the steady, solid returns their envied friends were getting.
Then, he and his promoters set sights on Europe, again framing the investments as memberships in a select club. A Swiss hedge fund manager, Michel Dominice, still remembers the pitch he got a few years ago from a salesman in Geneva. "He told me the fund was closed, that it was something I couldn't buy," Dominice said. "But he told me he might have a way to get me in. It was weird."
Madoff's agents next cut a cash-gathering swath through the Gulf, then Southeast Asia. Finally, they were hurtling with undignified speed toward China, with invitations to invest that were more desperate, less exclusive. One Beijing business executive who was approached said it seemed the Madoff funds were being pitched "to anyone who would listen."
The juggernaut began to sputter this fall as investors, rattled by the financial crisis and reaching for cash, started taking money out faster than Madoff could bring fresh cash in the door. He was arrested on Dec. 11 at his New York apartment and charged with securities fraud, turned in the night before by his sons after he told them his entire business was "a giant Ponzi scheme."
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