Members BigK Posted March 13, 2009 Members Posted March 13, 2009 It's about time. "Bernard Madoff's new Manhattan home is the size of a walk-in closet, with cinderblock walls, linoleum floors and a bunk bed. Breakfast will be served before sunrise, and the disgraced financier can stretch his legs outside, but only every other day - in a cage." So how long will he be sentenced for? I've heard up to 150 years. He's 70 years old...so basically a life sentence. Quote
AdamSmith Posted March 16, 2009 Posted March 16, 2009 How Dante would judge Madoff: worst of the worst... If Bernie Met Dante ... By RALPH BLUMENTHAL Published: March 14, 2009 Know that as soon as a soul commits betrayal The way I did, a devil displaces it And governs inside the body ...     Canto XXXIII of Dante’s “Inferno†(translation by Robert Pinsky) Yes, Bernard L. Madoff went to jail on Thursday after pleading guilty to a gargantuan Ponzi scheme, and yes, he may face the rest of his life in prison when he is sentenced to as much as 150 years on June 16. But if even that dose of clinical justice seems like paltry penance to his many bilked and ruined investors, including charities, they can always turn to literature for a further measure of satisfaction — and to pronounce, perhaps, another kind of final judgment. Mr. Madoff was 700 years too late to join Dante’s Who’s Who of sinners, but it is easy to imagine where the poet would consign this scam artist, who admitted to stealing as much as $65 billion: to the Pit, the Ninth (and deepest) Circle of Hell. It is where sins of betrayal are punished in a sea of ice fanned frigid by the six batlike wings of the immense, three-faced, fanged and weeping Lucifer. In Dante’s frightful underworld, sinners face a descending funnel of worsening torments keyed to their sins. The lustful are blown about in a whirlwind; the violent boil in a river of blood. But betrayers, alone at the bottom, are savaged by the one called emperor of the realm of grief, in person. “You’re buried in ice, because you’ve buried yourself in ice,†Mr. Pinsky, the nation’s poet laureate from 1997 to 2000 and a Dante scholar, said in an interview on Thursday. Poetic justice, indeed. It is fitting, Mr. Pinsky says. Betrayal destroys the trust that binds humanity, and with it, the betrayer himself. Dante was consumed by the sadness and mystery of sin — and what it did to the sinner: How is it that we choose to sin and wither? Like waves above Charybdis, each crashing apart Against the one it rushes to meet ... “It’s not a poem about ‘you did this, you get this,’ †Mr. Pinsky says. “It’s about the mystery of how you hurt yourself. It’s like the Talmud says: the evils others do to me are as nothing compared to the evils I do to myself.†But ice? In the pit of Hell? Exactly, Mr. Pinsky says. To Dante, sin is an absence of energy and moral force — freezing cold and darkness — and betrayal is an ultimate shutting down, a failure to exist. “Even murderers may be feeling something in other ways,†he says. Which could explain why the 70-year-old Mr. Madoff faces a sentence harsher than that given some killers. (He offered a brief apology in federal court in Manhattan without shedding much light on where the money went, how he stole it, and who may have helped him.) But if outraged victims still felt cheated — “I hope he is incarcerated with other rapists,†one said — there is comfort to be drawn from the rich imaginings of the Florentine master who began his “Divine Comedy†with a tour of Hell and its denizens. With the shade of Virgil as his guide, Dante (confessing his own struggle against sin and the depression of middle age) descends through levels of damnation beginning with Fore-Hell and Limbo, where the souls of those judged neither blessed nor wicked languish. Below, lesser sinners writhe in bogs, and yet further on, across the Plain of Fire to the Seventh Circle, violent sinners simmer in blood and are torn limb from limb by dogs. The Eighth Circle opens the way to Malebolge where sins of fraud are punished in vales of pitch and excrement. Thieves suffer a particular torment: Their hands were tied Behind their backs — with snakes that thrust between Where the legs meet, entwining tail and head Into a knot in front A ring of giants guards the Ninth Circle, the pit enclosing betrayers of family, of country and political faction and of guests and benefactors. In a particularly diabolical twist, some sinners have their souls consigned to Hell while they continue to dwell on earth, a devil inhabiting their body. And in the deepest pit of Hell, sunk in the ice, looms Lucifer himself, with three faces, red, black and whitish-yellow, and unfeathered wings fanning the winds to freeze the ice. Gripped in his fangs are Judas, Brutus and Cassius, the last two Caesar’s assassins, who serve, Mr. Pinsky notes, to make the ultimate betrayers more than an extension of Christian doctrine. “Dante was interested in what a soul could do to itself,†he says. “To betray everything you’re connected to is the bottom.†http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/weekinre...,%20Bernard%20L. Quote
Members BigK Posted March 17, 2009 Author Members Posted March 17, 2009 Prosecutors are now making noise about going after the wife & sons criminally and their assets. Do you think this is just a ploy to get the rest of the money, or is the whole family going down? Does Madoff have a deal?? It doesn't seem like it. Quote
Guest Conway Posted March 17, 2009 Posted March 17, 2009 Prosecutors are now making noise about going after the wife & sons criminally and their assets. Do you think this is just a ploy to get the rest of the money, or is the whole family going down? Does Madoff have a deal?? It doesn't seem like it. If they have been paid or hold the proceeds of the assets that he defrauded investors of, I expect that the civil courts will go after each and everyone of them...as they should. Quote
caeron Posted March 17, 2009 Posted March 17, 2009 Last I heard there was suspicions that the wife knew, but not the sons. But they'll all lose everything, as well they should. Quote
Members BigK Posted March 18, 2009 Author Members Posted March 18, 2009 Last I heard there was suspicions that the wife knew, but not the sons. But they'll all lose everything, as well they should. If the son's didn't know (which I'm suspicious about) they shouldn't lose everything. They had a job and were paid for it (again, unlikely they didn't know & help), then they should be able to keep any assets acquired from their pay. I heard that both sons owe their parents $30,000,000 each and that among the Madoff assets the government expects to collect are those promissory notes due in 2010. That money the son's will have to give up. And what if they can't come up with $30,000,000 you know the government will probably agree to a lesser amount and we'll never know of it. It is a bad time to being liquidating assets. Who's going to hire these guys? Quote
