That favourable view prevailed time and again over warnings from the likes of Arvidlund and Harry Markopoulos, a Boston accountant who spotted the impossibility of Madoff’s super-consistent investment performance and repeatedly urged the SEC to investigate. But they never did so properly, and Madoff just carried on shuffling cash through his giant Ponzi scheme — taking new investors’ money in, using it to pay dividends to existing investors, creaming some off for himself, but never actually investing any of it at all. Were it not for the fact that, in the financial panic of last autumn, too many investors wanted their cash out simultaneously, he might have kept up the façade until the day he died at his desk.

There was no great wizardry, just a rather elderly computer, some locked doors, a couple of dozen staff and a busy bank account. Arvidlund and Adam LeBor both do their best to make it sound interesting, but even after his fall Madoff did little to help them: when FBI officers came to his East Side apartment to arrest him he told them there was ‘no innocent explanation’, but refused to incriminate accomplices or say much else at all, except that he was sorry for the shame he had brought on his family.

So if you want all the known facts about the Madoff case so far, read Erin Arvidlund. If you want to understand why so many wealthy folk in the Palm Beach Country Club and elsewhere were suckered in by him, contemplate the fallibility and herd-instinct of human nature, especially in times of easy money and rising asset prices. And for a distinctive analysis of Madoff’s motivation in the context of his position in the American Jewish community — perhaps, under the suave exterior, there was contempt for the establishment Jews who were his clients but who looked down on those like him of recent East European origin — read Adam LeBor.

But don’t expect palpitations. LeBor has a nice final image of Madoff working in the engraving shop of Butner federal prison in North Carolina, where he is likely to spend the rest of his life. His job is to engrave nameplates for desks and doors, and for a moment I pictured him secretly engraving a plate for fake $100 bills with which he plans to buy himself a daredevil helicopter escape, a Caribbean hideout and a hot Latina girlfriend. But that just isn’t Madoff’s style, and he must be an awfully boring cellmate.

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