So Bernie Madoff conducts his illegal activities from the top of the 17th floor of a skyscraper in Manhattan. Legal business is conducted on the 19th floor. Filled to the ceiling with documents, the 17th floor conveys a haunting sense of rushed and dodgy activity, while two floors above everything is polished to a high gloss. And so the camera keeps panning back and forth between the underworld and the overworld in this impressive Netflix series.
Bernie Madoff: The Wall Street Monster tells the story of the greatest financial fraudster in US history. Directed by Joe Berlinger, who is otherwise at home in the splatter metier and most recently with Jeffrey Dahmer: Self-Portrait of a Serial Killer landed a huge success. Bernard Madoff’s story doesn’t contain any bloody scenes, but he can compete with some violent criminals in terms of ruthlessness.
Criminal activities in the slipstream of legality
In four one-hour episodes, Berlinger tells how a steep rise and fall takes place: Madoff relies on computer-aided trading early on and is ahead of its competitors. He is co-founder and chairman of the New York stock exchange NASDAQ and drafts laws for electronic securities trading with authorities.
At the same time, he – the financial genius – runs an investment business from the very beginning without the approval of the financial regulator. From the early 1990s at the latest, this business was organized as a Ponzi scheme: it promises investors high, regular returns on the money invested. However, he pays the returns out of his investors’ money without making any investments. When, in the panic of the 2008 financial crisis, everyone wanted their money back, the scam was exposed. By then, the fraud scheme had already grown to $64 billion.
In addition to the video recordings of Madoff’s interrogations, an impressive number of companions have their say: victims, employees, journalists. Berlinger skilfully weaves her stories into a great thriller, reenacting scenes and contrasting the helplessness of private investors with the constant failings of the supervisory authorities and institutional investors. Madoff’s company is audited several times by the financial regulator – and receives the seal of compliance. It is financial analyst Harry Markopolos who keeps presenting evidence of the fraud starting in 1999. Without success.
Ultimately, Madoff will have stolen from more than three million people. He is referred to several times in the series as a “financial serial killer”. On the one hand, this is due to genre habits, on the other hand, as Markopolos puts it, “people die in violent crimes before the investigations, in economic crimes afterwards”.
Bernie Madoff: The Wall Street Monster, on Netflix.
You can find more series recommendations here.