This...
Members of a posh Upper East Side synagogue suffered a $2 billion bloodbath in Bernie Madoff's epic Ponzi scheme.The Fifth Avenue Synagogue ranks with the decimated rolls of the Palm Beach Country Club in terms of members scorched by the scam.
And this...
Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff's family is coming apart at the seams, with his two sons refusing to talk to their parents and one getting hit with divorce papers the day of his dad's arrest.
...The one missing thing from these and many other reports concerning the scam of the decade indicates that, in the financial world, shame in the age of Bush is not the same (or as sharp) as shame in the age of Coolidge. The missing thing is not constituted by an absence but a presence. That presence is Madoff. He as a breathing and heart-beating being. In our time, his hands are free from doing the one thing that, 90 years ago, the hands of an exposed deceiver would have done immediately: take their own life out of the hot spotlight of the scandal and leave the world with a cold corpse to denounce. What vanished in the Bush years was a code of honor with any real meat in it. Now we see that night and day is what separates the investment banker of the Bush age from the samurai of the Sengoku period.