Madoff and the Mayor: Two Tales of Wealth

As a news person—and as a blogger who has to come up with SOMETHING to write about—I’m always intrigued with the juxtaposition of certain stories which happen at the same time. This doesn’t make me unique; it’s been columnist and blogger fodder as long as there have been columnists and bloggers. (Frank Rich of the New York Times is really good at this. Check out his column last week linking the economic meltdown with the increasing number of revivals of the play “Our Town.”) Our juxtaposition to discuss today is the tale of two wildly wealthy New Yorkers who now find themselves on opposite ends of the societal spectrum: Bernard Madoff and Mike Bloomberg.

Putting shame before glory, let’s take Madoff first. His guilty pleas today, to multiple criminal counts associated with what may be the single greatest property crime ever committed, have him behind bars already, and there, it is projected, he will stay. The hollow and unemotional apology he offered the court and his many victims only confirms what I speculated upon in a post earlier this week—that he is a sociopath of the highest (lowest?) order. Bernard Madoff has become, and very likely will remain, the symbol of the greed and delusion that gripped our culture during the bull market years. (By the way, I and I alone, have in mind the perfect actor to play Bernie Madoff when the inevitable movie gets made: Judd Hirsch. Discuss.)

Then there’s Mayor Bloomberg. In the same 24-hour span during which Madoff faced the music, Bloomberg was listed by Forbes magazine as the richest New Yorker, and the only person on the magazine’s list of billionaires to actually see his net worth increase in 2008. It went from $11-billion to $16-billion, give or take a few hundred-million. I find it sort of geometrically perfect that the biggest city in the country has as its political leader its richest citizen. Whether it’s perfectly right or perfectly wrong is a matter of opinion, but you can’t take away the scope of the man’s accomplishments. That’s where the tales of these two men so profoundly diverge: Madoff turned to crime after becoming rich. Bloomberg turned to public service and large-scale philanthropy, and became richer.

An essential difference is in the ways they made their fortunes. Bloomberg got rich by making and selling something … the Bloomberg computer terminals sitting in front of virtually everyone working in the financial industries. Madoff made his fortune by (purportedly) moving piles of money around. One of them could never lie about what he was doing because an actual product had to be delivered; the other could lie for decades, because the returns were, literally, only on paper. The world certainly needs financiers and brokers, but if the Madoff scandal and the collapse of our economic house of cards result in fewer young people pursuing careers based on making money from money, I think that’s all to the good.

Two New Yorkers, roughly the same age, climbing aboard the money train at roughly the same time. Now, one will live the rest of his life in a tiny cell, and be remembered as an epitome of non-homicidal evil. The other will continue running America’s greatest city, and continue making and giving away enormous amounts of money. Yes-- to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald--the rich really are different from you and me. But also from each other.