Welcome back to bribes, swindle, or steel. I'm Alexandra Rogge, and today we're revisiting the Bernie

Madoff's story from a slightly different angle. A couple of months ago, I interviewed Ike Sorkin,

Bernie Madoff's lawyer. But today we're talking with an award-winning financial journalist with the New York Times and author of The Wizard of Lies, Bernie Madoff, and the Death of Trust, which was turned into an excellent Emmy-nominated movie starring Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer.

Released in May of this year, the author played herself in the movie, which I have to think was a lot of fun.

Diane Enriquez, thank you for joining me.

Thank you for having me, Alexandra.

Why do we start with the title, The Wizard of Lies?

What did you have in mind with that?

Well, it actually was kind of nestled away in the back of my mind after a court hearing that I covered in the midst of the Madoff fallout, the bankruptcy court judge who was overseeing the liquidation of the Madoff firm, hearing the bankruptcy trustees' description of a number of finagals that Madoff had gone through,

kind of in a bemused way, said, oh, it's sort of like the Wizard of Oz, you know,

pay no attention to that man behind the curtain and evoking that

image from that great film.

That sort of caught my attention as made off at this sort of shadowy figure in the background,

you know, pulling the buttons and pushing the bellows and making all these dramatic movements.

But as the book moved forward and I was unsuccessful repeatedly in trying to persuade Madoff himself to talk to me, I gravitated towards a

different title, which shall be lost in the dustbin of history here. When he finally agreed in

the summer of 2010 to do the interviews that were portrayed in the HBO film,

it was clear to me that he had moved right back into the center of this web of a story I was trying to tell.

And that line came back to me and bouncing it back and forth with my

editor. I came up with Wizard and he came up with lies. And there we were. So we were at it. We were home.

And I can see that. And it's fascinating how he was really behind the scenes, pulling the strings.

But at the same time, he had, it seems, a very

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