Madoff in a pickle Tom Smith

What Madoff actually deserves is to be hooked up to an experience machine that would cause him to experience the anguish of each of the thousands of people he defrauded.  What he will get does not sound like any picnic either.

(Actually, this is sort of an interesting question.  Would it be fair punishment to hook a murderer up to a machine that caused him to experience the pain of his victim, along with that of his family members upon learning the victim had been killed?  It sounds fair to me, but I bet many opponents of capital punishment would say it was excessively cruel.  It is plausible to imagine that a murderer who killed a victim who was much loved would elect to be lethally injected rather than to undergo the ordeal, which suggests to me that capital punishment is fair.  OTOH if you killed somebody who was much hated, your punishment might be pleasurable, except for your victim's direct experiences.  In this way, the legal system could create optimal incentives to kill SOBs humanely.)

This is something I don't understand about major fraudsters.  Assume you decide you are going steal millions of dollars, through whatever process that is.  If you are smart enough to steal the money and get away with it for a while, why don't you sock some of it away somewhere and then flee at the first sign of trouble?  Why wait around until you have no chance to escape?  And then, once you are caught, why don't you just kill yourself, assuming you don't have religious scruples against doing so, as I take it most major fraudsters do not?

For all that they are doubtless bad men, I have a certain grudging admiration for Roman Polanski and Marc Rich (good name).  They should not have (respectively) sexually molested an underage female or not paid their taxes.  But in each case, the evil doer decided, heck, I'm bad enough to do the crime, so I'm bad enough to avoid the time.  At least that's consistent.  Is Madoff motivated by a belated desire to atone for his crimes, or just an inability to imagine his life somewhere else?  If it's the latter, I think you could accuse him of lacking integrity.  He has failed to embrace fully his identity as a criminal.  Even as a criminal, he's a failure.  Though granted, he did steal a lot of money.

Comments

[enemyofthepeople]

I take ypur point, but let us never forget that Polanski's crime was fare more than the pled out sexual molestation of an underage female. According to the THIRTEEN YEAR OLD victim, Polanski drugged her with champagne and Quaaludes, then forcibly raped her vaginally and anally.

Polanski deserved death.

[Tom Smith]

ech. That's pretty bad. I didn't realize it was that bad. What a scumbag.

[Alan Wynnewood]

I assume that having the sons turn him in was a planned attempt to shield the sons. "How could co-conspirators turn in their own father?", the jury may well later wonder. I also assume Madoff's motivation, once hopelessly in over his head, was to leave billions abroad for his sons and his favorite charities. I believe he'll succeed at both, and die happy. And SIPC will be out ca. 2 billion dollars.

I note that Polanski held on to many of his friends in the acting and art worlds, especially in Europe, after committing the brutal rape and fleeing. The culturnii are so understanding. Sartre (with admitted help from de Beauvoir) was little better than Polanski, perhaps worse. What is culture? Ah, to be a sophomore again...

[Dan Simon]

Most criminals don't think things through very well, or they wouldn't become criminals in the first place, since criminality really doesn't have very good long-term prospects. Bank robbers, for instance, are almost always eventually caught, even though bank robbery is actually incredibly easy. The problem is that each robbery typically only yields a few thousand dollars, so the robber ends up having to do it over and over again, until he (or she) eventually makes a big mistake and gets caught.

As for Madoff, I suspect that fleeing is simply beyond his imagination. He's made a lifetime out of portraying a respected investment advisor, and simply doesn't know how to play any other role. The best liars, as they say, believe their own lies, and I expect Madoff believes himself to be every bit the pillar of Wall Street respectability that he spent all those years pretending to be. For such a person, of course, fleeing would be unthinkable.