Module 2: "The Wizard of Lies" by Diana Henriques

Any number of crimes may be committed by a seedy-looking, shifty-eyed, inarticulate grifter in a cheap suit and scuffed shoes, but a Ponzi scheme is never going to be one of them.

Any number of crimes may be committed by a seedy-looking, shifty-eyed, inarticulate grifter in a cheap suit and scuffed shoes, but a Ponzi scheme is never going to be one of them.

Of course it's comforting to think that only a soulless, heartless monster could have inflicted such pain on those he knew and supposedly cared about, that no human being could construct a life of such brazen, destructive lies.

We all delude ourselves about ourselves, every single day.

So to insist, as so many of his victims have, that Bernie Madoff was not fully human, that he was a beast, a psychopath, is a facile cop-out, one last comforting delusion that will leave us forever vulnerable to the seductive spells that all Ponzi schemers cast.

He was greedy for money and praise, arrogantly sure of his own capacity to pull it off, smugly dismissive of skeptics—just like anyone who mortgaged the house to invest in tech stocks, or tapped the off-limits college fund to gamble on a new business, or put all the retirement savings into a hedge fund they didn't understand, or cheated a little on the tax return or the expense account or the spouse.

His imagination constructed a soaring scaffold of deceit that towered over the simple cover stories we occasionally hammer together.

His lies were massively larger than ours, and they lasted longer, survived more scrutiny, were more ambitiously conceived and elaborately documented.

His customers ignored the fact that his results were increasingly implausible and his operations were suspiciously secret.

But the wizard behind the curtain—pumping the bellows and pushing the buttons and working the microphone to create his utterly convincing illusions, even after the prison doors had clicked shut behind him—was able to build his Emerald City only because such an extraordinary number of people decided to believe him.

Because he was fundamentally human and seemed to live in the same world they did, they could believe that somehow it would all work out, that they could ignore unpleasant realities without incurring unpleasant consequences.

So, like every philandering spouse, every opportunistic cheat, every impulsive risk-taker—like so many of us, only more so—Bernie Madoff thought he could avoid the implacable dead-end finale of the Ponzi scheme and somehow get away with it.

So, like every philandering spouse, every opportunistic cheat, every impulsive risk-taker—like so many of us, only more so—Bernie Madoff thought he could avoid the implacable dead-end finale of the Ponzi scheme and somehow get away with it.

Whatever their niggling doubts, they are reassuring themselves right this minute about how trustworthy he is, as he spins out his vibrant, beautiful web of fantasy.