Welcome back to the podcast, bribes, swindle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogge.

Today we're going to hear the story of Bernie Madoff from Diana Henriquez.

Diana is a wonderful speaker, an author, and a financial journalist.

For our purposes today, she wrote The Wizard of Lies,

Bernie Madoff, and the Death of Trust.

Diana gave this excellent talk at the Trace Bribery

and Economic Crime Summit in Vancouver in June.

In it, she describes not only what Madoff did

and what other con men do,

but the conditions they rely on to succeed at their

cons and how simple, disciplined measures can thwart them. Diana. The beautiful title that

Alexander came up with for my talk is the ambiguity of trust in the financial markets.

The subtitle is, trust lies in Bernie Madoff.

Bernie Madoff is a liar.

He is the most gifted liar that I have ever met in nearly 50 years of writing about white-collar crime.

Madoff's gift for telling lies helped him, of course, build a historic fraud that wiped out

$65 billion in paper wealth.

It triggered at least three suicides that we know of.

It ruined tens of thousands of people.

I've seen an account of affected people that goes

as high as 3 million people, grant recipients from foundations that were ruined and so forth.

...