A bland villain

I’ve always thought of fraud as a relatively attractive form of crime — not, of course, in the sense that I daydream of committing it, but in the sense that it involves intelligence, imagination and nerve, rather than violence and damage.

I’ve always thought of fraud as a relatively attractive form of crime — not, of course, in the sense that I daydream of committing it, but in the sense that it involves intelligence, imagination and nerve, rather than violence and damage. Leaving aside the matter of moral conscience, a really smart fraudster has to combine the confidence of an actor with the sleight of hand of a magician and the technical skills of an accountant or a computer geek. You have to be brave enough to look your pursuers in the eye and brazen it out to the last, even if you know the game is up. And when the handcuffs finally click, you have to reveal with a last flash of bravado the dazzling intricacies of how you did it, so that no one can do it again but someone can make a decent caper movie.

On all those counts, Bernie Madoff is a dismal disappointment, despite the world-record scale of his crime. He was neither a risk-addicted extrovert nor an ardent womaniser nor an obvious bounder — unlike, say, the bogbrush-moustached Texan-born financier Sir Alan Stanford, who seems to have been all three and who now awaits trial for his own alleged multi-billion scam. Instead, Madoff was a bland, tanned septuagenarian Jewish socialite in New York and Palm Beach, whose well-heeled but unflamboyant lifestyle makes dull material for a biographer, even one as diligent as Erin Arvidlund. Attempts to uncover a wilder streak in Madoff’s youth — he once drove too fast down a narrow, snowbound city street, for instance — just don’t do the trick.