Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - Jim Campbell: The Man Who Made Madoff Talk

Episode Date: August 16, 2023

This week, Anthony talks with radio host and author of Madoff Talks, Jim Campbell. Jim reveals how he was able to get Bernie and the Madoff family including Ruth and Andrew, to share their truth with him. They discuss the complexities of the $64B fraud, the failure of the regulatory agencies, whether the Madoff family were really involved - and the real contrast between Madoff and Sam Bankman-Fried. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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DECC.ca to learn more. Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word from authors and historians to figures and entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe, wherever you get your podcast, and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones.

I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know. Anyways, let's get to it. We all know Bernie Madoff in his Ponzi scheme that cost investors as much as $65 billion. Many of you like me would have been working on Wall Street when the scheme unfolded. But we all still have so many questions. Who really knew what was going on? How did he pull this off for 40 years?

And what about his family? My guest today, Jim K. Campbell is one of the only people Bernie and the Madoff family gave those intricate details to, and he shares them all with us on today's show. So joining us now is Jim Campbell. He's a radio host and author. The book is called Madoff Talks, uncovering the untold story behind the most notorious Ponzi scheme in history. Jim, welcome to the show. But what a fascinating book. I just want to start with your interest in Madoff. I mean, you've had such a great career. What gravitated you towards Madoff? And tell us why you wanted to dig into this particular story. Okay. First off, it's an honor to be

on your show. We are both Tufts graduates, I have found out, which is a great link there. And you're a fun to funds guy. And of course, the feeder funds were at the heart of the, let's say, abrogation of due diligence. You know, when it comes to Bernie, a lot of it was fortuitous because I was doing an interview with Lori Sandale who wrote a book on the Madoff family side only. And out of the blue, she says, well, Jim, your show's live. Do you want to talk off the record with Andy Madoff on the day before? So I call Andy. I jump all over him from the start and found him disarmingly honest. And he said he was going to listen to the show to see if you heard the same kind of stuff out of me. And then And fortuitous number two, his mom, Ruth Madoff, is moving to Greenwich from Florida.

And I live in Greenwich. So I said, I'll take her out to lunch. Probably no one else will. And we met in a restaurant in December. She had sunglasses on, wouldn't take them off until later, ate a chef's salad like she hadn't eaten. And again, we hit it off. And she said she was going to contact Bernie and tell Bernie to talk to me.

So Bernie says, I'll talk to you. I said, Bernie, I'm going to vet everything, single thing you say. He says, Jim, I'm going to accept that. And the next thing we know, we had 400 pages of communications. I was interested in three things. One, getting inside his mind, which is unfathomable. Number two, the Justice Department, the FBI, the bankruptcy trustee, all thought Andy, Mark, and Ruth had to know.

I wanted to do my own independent investigation, and I had it came up with a different answer. And thirdly, the untold story that hadn't been put together was the failure of the architecture of the regulatory system. from the SEC to SIPIC to Wall Street, and I tried to build that all into one story. And let me just put one more plug in. The Netflix docu series, Made Off the Monster of Wall Street, is running. Joe Berlinger, the number one true crime director for Netflix, did a superb job, very honest linkage directly to the book.

And it must have been good because Jamie Diamond called me the day after it premiered. Well, listen, I watched the documentary. I read the book. I found everything in the thing fascinating. And for me, it's like a great coroner's report. And I think, and I'm going to applaud you for a second because you make all of us safer. After reading your book, I installed a few additional safeguards at Skybridge. And I want to test a theory on you, get your reaction. It felt like the made-off crime was a close-knit crime. It was himself, perhaps his brother, an accountant, his assistant. And I really believe that the way you commit a crime, Jim, is with a closed net. If you've got 50 or 60 people, working on it, there's always a person of conscience. This is, hey, this isn't for me. I'm going to the feds or I'm going to do XYZ. And so at Skybridge, I've got JPMorgan as my bank. I've got Pershing as my, you know, like clearing person, if you will. KPMG does our audits. So you've got a hundred different

people before a key can get turned or money can get released. There's enough people in the mix where a crime can't be committed. That was one of the big things that came out of the book for me. You don't think they weren't involved. I don't either, by the way, which is I find that. there's a difference with the FBI. I guess I think everybody's a criminal. But I want to ask you this question because when I closed your book, I was like, how to hell that Jim Campbell get these people to open up the way they did? I mean, they disclosed new information to you, Jim. How did you get that done? It's not just the chef salad and your smile. Something else happened. Yeah, you know, that's a great question. In fact, Bill Cohen, who wrote a blur for the cover, said the same thing.

How did I get these guys to talk? And, you know, I guess I come across his objective that I'm going to tell the story as I see it based on facts. I'm going to verify facts. And other than that, I have a hard time understanding because you've got to remember Bernie, Ruth, and he didn't know me from dirt. I came out of the blue. And none of them saw the book or any conclusions until the Sunday morning news, CBS Sunday morning. I was on that. That was the first time they heard anything.

They were all watching. And so it is hard to understand why Bernie would open up. Now, you said these things are closed. It was very closed-knit. But the thing is Bernie's mind is so compartmentalized that he kept everybody else in silos. So he's the only guy that even saw the overall perspective. And he never would have admitted to his family that he had the term to a criminal enterprise to save his firm. And remember, he ran a host.

trading firm that executed trades for discount brokers primarily. It was worth $3 billion of its own without any Ponzi scheme. And everybody on the 19th floor was honest and good. And then on 17th floor was high school graduates who enabled the thing for 40 years and never even figured out it was a Ponzi scheme. Yeah, no, I felt like you had a Oriental rug and that, you know, chestnut, walnut on the 19th floor, but then you had this like laundry facility for the narcos, you know, crime cartel, you know, and the dichotomy was sort of bizarre. So tell us about Bernie Madoff, sociopath, accidental villain, did he slip into it and then become evil? What happened in your mind? What were the revelations? Yeah, that's another great question.

You know, Bernie gave me this intricate story that he hadn't really told publicly because of the fact he thought it was too complex, that he was running this purely legitimate business, and just like a gambler, took a loss and made the moral mistake and legal mistake of doubling down on it. No one will notice I run a little ponsie. We'll catch up and bingo. It'll go away, which of course never happens, just like it doesn't happen in gambling. And, you know, sociopath, he had a lack of empathy. In fact, he would start off and say, you know, I'd say, Bernie, what is your remorse on this?

and he'd say, well, my lawyers tell me I have to have remorse. And I said, let's that the best way, Bernie, to express remorse. So obviously there were signs of that. Berlinger said there were similarities to serial killers because he'd done Ted Bundy, a thing on Whitey Bulger as well as Jeffrey Epstein. But the thing is that what happened is the wholesale trading business fit his psychology perfectly, transaction-based commissions, if the market's up or down, control costs, leading edge in technology, and higher good people.

The other business involved making trades where you could lose money, and he psychically could not accept any loss. And as you know, his fund went up every single month forever. And rather than say, you know, this business of money management isn't for me, he basically doubled down on it. But here's the other thing is, as you said, that he slipped into this. That's what he was trying to convey. But once I looked at it, he ran both businesses side by side from the same time, which is really what's unfabled. Well, I want to set that scene for you because this man was so respected, Jim. Yes.

When I joined Goldman Sachs, I was in the private client area. And so my task was to go out and meet high net worth individuals, ask them to open accounts with Goldman. And I was running into people. They said, well, you know, I want to do 1% a month. Will you be able to do 1% a month for me like Bernie Madoff? And I'm like, no, actually. I don't think we could do that.

Well, you know what? I don't have any interest in you. I remember going back to my manager and saying, who the hell is Bernie Madoff? And how is he doing 1% a month? And it was. People can pretend otherwise, sir. It was a fait accompli that he had new sauce, a new fangled thinking. He had a strategy that was revered.

It was very few people. I know a few guys at the end, like Harry Markopoulos and those guys got the wind of it. But remember, he had SEC audits. He thought he was cooked in 2005. And the SEC says, no, this is good. Thank you. We'll see you in a couple of years. So what was it? What was it about the Bernie Madoff aura? Everybody revises history now, Jim. Oh, I knew he was a crook. I did not know he was a crook. I met him three times. The only reason why I didn't invest with him is I didn't understand what he was doing. And so I had that cardinal rule for me. Trust me, I've lost money with other people, Jim. Okay, I'm not saying it that way. But I, what was it? What was his patina? What was his And, you know, you're right, he had tremendous respect. And of course, I said, you know, Bernie, the reason you're such a good con man is you're the anti-con. He was behind a curtain on the 17th floor. You couldn't really talk to him directly. He didn't allow due diligence. And he just produced

these results. And this split-strike conversion strategy, very opaque. I never found any of his clients or even on the 19th floor traders who understood it. And yet it was highly simple. It should have mirrored the overall indexes, right? Which, of course, right away, you it's infeasible because you can't just go go straight up. The SEC never have the right people looking at his books because they were separate silos for money management, asset management, and broker-dealer. And they kept having only broker-dealer guys on who thought he was front-running, right? That was the rumor why he wasn't losing money. But he not only was never trading through his own firm, he was never trading at all. And sort of like SBF, he built this great scheme of

credibility. SBF kind of bought it by giving donations and hiring, you know, ex-guides out of the CFTC. Bernie did it through a combination of, you know, he ran the, he architected the NASDAQ and then he was chairman. The SEC used to actually go to him to ask him what was going on in a firm like Goldman or Salomon, if they didn't understand what was going on, and he would help translate it for him. Also, he didn't cheat. He never cheated his customers on the legitimate side of the business. He was one of the founders of payment for order flow, right, which a lot of people say, Robin Hood abused, for instance, but he didn't abuse it. He took that, he gave that rebate back, but he gave them best price execution, even above the public market displays. So he had a tremendous

image, and he was also a bully. You know, he either, he ran the firm like a family, which they love, or he bullied you, or he paid you with golden handcuffs overpaying these guys that were administrative high school graduates downstairs. 700,000 is what, you know, and at Bonjourna was making, when she retired with a $58 million fake IRA, and she had no education, basically. Yeah, I mean, look, but I mean, that's what he did. He sucked them in. They were very loyal to him, and they were helping him perpetrate this crime. He also had, like, an accountant across the Tappancy Bridge. Nobody really knew. People were okay with that because he was Bernie Madoff. Joe Berlinger, let's talk about him for a second. I saw an interview of Joe's on CNBC,

where he told Andrew Roar Sork, and he felt that the people that invested in Bernie's business knew he was a fraud. But they did it anyway because they wanted to get those returns and a result of which they were like, hey, I don't care if the guy's a fraud. He's making me money. It's good for me.

Do you believe that? Do you believe that people... I believe you can break it into three categories. One is people who definitely knew he was doing illegal stuff. They didn't know Ponzi's game. And the big four fit under there, Jeffrey Pickauer, and those folks. The feeders, a lot of them, Fairfield Greenwich,

had to have known the results were real, okay? The second group is, well, we think he's a crook, he's our crook, he's probably front-running, but so what, we'll let it go. And then the third group are completely innocent, many of moderate net worth who'd been with him for 40 years and were completely clueless.

So it kind of co-conspirators to willfully blind to innocent completely. I don't want to give away the book, because the book is just too good. But I got to ask these questions just to make our podcast interesting, okay? Sure. Help me understand his lawyers.

J.P. Morgan Chase. Help me understand the web of service providers around him. How could they have not tripped the switch somewhere? Yeah, you know, J.P. Morgan, and as I said, I'm a fan of Jamie Diamond, and he was very nice on the phone. He let me basically interrupt him and telling him he didn't have his information, but great guy. And I counted at least six divisions

at J.P. Morgan who interfaced with Bernie, several of which knew something wasn't right. And there was no, and they maintained there was no horizontal way to connect J.P. Morgan back. And I, and I give them that to a certain extent. But, you know, when the UK made off finally went to the UK financial authority, because they were being threatened by the Colombian drug lords on, you know, the Bank Medici FEMA fund, they didn't bother to tell the SEC in the U.S. or the divisions. And there were divisions like private wealth that were bragging that they hadn't got sucked into Bernie, but didn't tell their clients that, you know. And of course, the basic thing, the 703 account, $170 billion went through that account.

And J.P. Morgan was told it was an operating expense account, which is ridiculous. One month before it went down, they thought it was the market making account, which had been at Bank of America for 30 years. And the other thing, they're the only people that could view his account, right? It was an equity strategy. There should have been $4.4 billion of dividends deposited. There should have been counterparty payments either way. And there was never $1 of dividend deposited and never $1 of counterparty transactions in that account.

So, yeah, it should have been widely open. The SEC missed five separate investigations. Even when they caught him in contradictory statements, it lies, et cetera. So it's hard not to blame him. And the feeders, the feeders knew he wasn't doing the strategy in the case of some of them. Jim, the sins of the father. Did he kill his sons? Yeah, that's a good question.

You know, Andy, Andy worded it this way. He killed my brother quickly and he's killing me slowly. As you know, Andrew died in 2014, I believe, of leukemia that had recurred and Mark committed suicide. And, you know, it's an unbelievable story, Eleanor Squaleri, driving home that very first night in a car to Staten Island. her daughter calls her in the car and says, you know, she'd work in the front office as interns in the summer during their high school years. So she knew the boys. And Bernie's only been arrested for about three hours. And she tells her mother, I know, Mark, he's not going to be able to handle this.

He's going to commit suicide. And he did, you know, two years to the day of Bernie's arrest. A lot of people thought that might be a consciousness of guilt. No, it wasn't. It was that he couldn't deal with it. They were betrayed. He had a much more fragile ego. Andy was very tough. But, I mean, again, I'm not a psychologist, but I think there had to be some layers of

depression in there on top of the calamity that his father perpetrated. Andy, of course, had leukemia, the stress probably of the whole situation contributed to that relapse. What about, what can you tell us about Ruth Madoff? Yeah, Ruth was almost cult-like devoted to Bernie. So she believed basically everything. And in fact, even after it happened, he was BSing her. And the boy, were really saying, you know, you got to cut contact with her or we're not going to have much to do with you. She was a very attractive, smart woman. And, you know, she probably played a little bit more ignorant with me than she really is. But she did not know, she lived with her sister in Florida for a while. They were wiped out. So they were, she and the husband were driving a limo to the airport

as a service to survive. And obviously, they wouldn't have had Ruth with them. She trusted me completely. We texted all the time. And, you know, I would tell her, you know, I was talking to this person. They can't believe you didn't know. And, you know, she would respond to that. And she was just a very interesting person. After, after the book went to McGraw Hill, she said that she didn't want to talk anymore. I think part of that was because they were trying to get early compassionate release from Bernie. So the press, you know, this wouldn't have been a good thing. As I say, I gave her the book. So she has it. I don't know what she thought of it. But the fact that she totally trusted me. asked for no editorial content. In fact, you know, as I said, I could have found that they were

complicit. In fact, it went right down to the edge for me to find out confidently that they weren't. I had to find a deep throat inside Madov to verify what I thought. You know, the bankruptcy trustee thought these $800 million of losses that Bernie covered by laundering money from 17 to 19 was due to trading losses. It never made sense to me that a small proprietary group would have been kept going with $800 million of losses. And, of course, it wasn't. trading losses. But I had to verify that before I, you know, I could be comfortable. And as I said, they're culpable on a moral basis, just as the SEC is. They took a lot of money out of there. And, you know, they have to be accountable. They root signed the tax returns. The tax returns

were totally phonyed by that guy in the strip mall that you're talking about. What was the most surprising thing you learned, Jim? The most surprising thing, I think, was Bernie's mind. And coupled with, with the complete failure of the regulatory system and on Wall Street. I don't think anybody realized it. We haven't talked about how SIPIC failed. And it's just how, you know, FINRA failed, the SEC failed, the feeder funds, the banks, the bankruptcy trustee then completely abused his power, if you asked me.

And it's almost mind-boggling how the whole story hangs together like that. And of course, you know, the fact that I found differently than the. entire spectrum of the investigative bodies and the public on whether they knew or not. You know, those were all surprises, I think. But, you know, Bernie's, you know, is just a unique entity of himself. And remember, he pulled this off for 40 years. And it really unbelievable. As you know, Ponzi schemes by definition cannot last, and they generally cannot last long. FTCX. Let's talk about that. Sure. I got, you know, you may know this. I mean, I, I, I, I liked Sam. I trusted Sam. I ended up selling a piece of my business to Sam. I guess the good news is he gave me the money, Jim. I didn't give him the money. But, you know, and I admired Sam's parents, particularly his dad. I got very close to his dad. What's your reaction to the FDX story?

Yeah. You know, my reaction to that is, first off, I found it very interesting that he and Bernie as two different entities, Bernie looking like a Wall Street guy and SBF purposely not. But they both built reputation. of credibility. Nobody in the crypto communities ever said I support regulation, and he presented that. And the thing about SBF that bothers me is basically his story is the dog ate my homework. Didn't know what I was doing. We had no accounting system. I didn't, you know, and meanwhile, not only did he have all these conflict of interest things with the hedge fund Alameda, right, that his girlfriend was running who didn't know anything. But if the dog ate his homework, this is one hell of a smart dog. He had $1.3 billion that he had. he borrowed against that, and they programmed it so that he would not be billed interest on top of

that that was accruing. Now, how does that happen without some degree of culpability? Having no systems in place. And again, now, similar to Madoff, I got to blame the institutions for a failure of due diligence, right? I mean, not talking about you necessarily, but Sequoia, Black Rock, all of those firms were basically vouching for the guy. So we have the same failure of due diligence we had before. we had the same building of sort of a false credibility. And a Ponzi scheme involves no real trading, right? But there was real trading in crypto, but the FTT token, which had to remain stable, right? Because all the loans on the money they'd absconded with as collateral had to stay consistent. There's, I'm assuming there's got to be, and the SEC said that some manipulation of the market to keep that FTT token. So, you know, Sam seemed like a great guy. You say, you know, his parents and everything. But the actions, seem to be criminal in nature above and beyond the dog eating his homework. Well, listen, I mean, and again, you know, he had the reason everybody got bamboozled, if you went into his data room, he had probably one of the more pristine data rooms,

moreover, like Bernie Madoff, there was some of the legitimacy going on. I spent 48 hours in the Bahamas, 24 of them, 12 hours a day, okay, on the treating desk, watching his activity, looking at flows, looking at data coming through the servers. He had 12.5% of the cryptocurrency markets from an exchange point of view. So, I mean, what he blew, Jim, is absolutely catastrophic and tragic. I mean, ultimately, like Madoff, he had an ego where he didn't want to, quote, unquote, lose money. So he borrowed the money from his clients to make up for his losses. Had he just said, hey, I've lost money. I'm taking an XYZ loss. He had a very legitimate at trading business going on?

You know, it's funny. You tell me that because Madoff downstairs had a very intricate phony. He set up a screen that was, he said, live contact, right, with the DTC, where all the clearing goes on. And he says, I'll show you the inventory of my stocks. Pick one out. And the guy who said, okay, Apple. And then the, you know, DePascali was in another room, right, putting and typing it into

the screen. And that bamboozled people to it. And, of course, as you know, upstairs, he did. have completely legitimate systems. Every trade could be proven to clear through the DTC. 174 never had a trade go through the DTC. So it is interesting. And they both play this sort of good guy, innocent type of thing as well, which to me makes them look like worse sociopaths, to be honest. I agree with it. What does this say, if it says anything, but I'd like your opinion, what does it say about the culture on Wall Street? You know, I'm a big fan of Wall Street. A lot of

brilliant people, a lot of good work done. So I'm not, you know, some kind of crusading and anti-Wall Street guy. I'm critical of the business conflicts of interest, right, where the customer gets screwed. I'm critical of, there's sort of an unwritten omerta, because I kept asking, you know, what Marilyn Goldman, for instance, said, we're not trading with this guy. Something's up. But they didn't tell anybody that, and they didn't tell clients. They didn't tell the SEC. And that kind of, you know, that kind of bothers me. And, of course, the feeder funds are an absolute disgrace. Bernie passed on those fees to them, which means we have to give up all our due diligence, which is their only job, right? Administering and picking out funds that match risk profiles.

And, you know, so how can you not be, you know, critical of that? Then you get to SBX years later, right? And the system failed again, basically. You know, there is no crypto regulation. But, you know, when this book came out, I said SPACs, which were a good innovation initially, crypto, Robin Hood, oh, we're going to blow up. And I was just saying that, right? And I'm not a regulatory guy. And, you know, after all the years, every one of them blew up because the SEC is not a cop on the beat. It comes in afterwards to clean up messes. It's a cultural thing, by the way, they're set up. Okay. So we're down to the point of my podcast where I come up with five words, Jim, and then you can react to these five words. You can give me a sentence, a paragraph, or just a word. Okay. Okay. So I want to, the first word I want to give you is Ponzi. I mean, I say Ponzi, what do you think of? I say fake investment activity and makes people that are non-sophisticated, highly susceptible. There is no such thing as a market-rated business that you can predict the rate of return. And Bernie would give that out on January 1, as you know.

Yeah, I mean, I say, when I hear Ponzi, I think too good to be true, right? And that's probably in hindsight, the FDX and the Madoff story. I want to go back to Wall Street. When I say Wall Street, what do you think of? I think of the banks, I think of the folks on it, both on the commercial bank side and on the investment banking side. And I think of basically a financial intermediary role. And I'm just a critic of business models that are in conflict. Robin Hood's business model, payment for order flow was screwing their clients, for instance. Yeah. Well, I, you know, it's interesting because I, the best part of Wall Street is it's the arterial flow of capital through the American capitalist system.

It's very vital to the whole economy, but the darker side of Wall Street is that there is some nefarious self-dealing that goes on that people have to be cautious of. When I say the Madoff Sons, what do you say? I say a tragic story. I say they don't get let off the hook for not figuring it out, although nobody figured it out. And Andy, who I knew personally was a person of honor, a person of integrity. and the tragedy is unfathomable, although I don't put it on the level of wiping out a middle-class guy. So these are two words, same person, but they mean different things, I think, right? So Madoff.

I think Madoff is synonymous with basically the criminal fraud on Wall Street and able to pull this off over 40 years. He, again, was charismatic, brilliant in terms of what he'd done. He could have been a Bill Gates on Wall Street. So I get over that compartmentalized sociopathic mind. I'm going to say the word Bernie. Isn't that different from the word Madoff? Yeah, because just the name Bernie came with trust. It came with credibility.

It came with Do Not Question Me. And yeah, I see Madoff as the overall arching crime. And I see Bernie as the individual who pulled this off. Yeah, it's this thing. And you mentioned it in the book, which is why I'm bringing up both of them. Let me ask you this question. This is in the same vein, and I want to get your reaction. The customer.

Yeah, the customer is a huge piece to me. And the customer was screwed in this throughout. And it's these innocent folks who were wiped out and devastated that just gets to my heart. And, you know, is what breaks you apart. And, you know, Wall Street really is founded on the customer. I have always admired Goldman Sachs, you know, Crito, of putting the customer first. And they have to fight that conflict all the time. They screw it up a lot. But it was there. And Gus Levy was behind that, as you know. And I'm a big fan of firms that

genuinely put the customer first. Yeah, well, legendary Gus Levy, John Weinberg, you're a Greenberg, so you know these men, John L. Weinberg. They all put the customer first. I think the problem we have on Wall Street is that when the customer turns into a counterparty, Jim, when the firm looks like the, oh, I'm going to pick the customer off. The Robin Hood story is an example of that. Once the customer looks like a counterparty, then things get really bad on Wall Street. And so that's something we always have to be watched. They hide behind that. They'll say, well, we're a counterparty. We're a principal here. So it doesn't, we're taking the opposite side to help facilitate stuff. But that doesn't mean that you screw the customer. Right, exactly. Last one, the made-off documentary. Why should people watch that, Jim? Well, first off, and it's a theme of my book, too, is people think they know the made-off story. No, they don't. Most of it is unknown because of all these other components, I said, and Berlinger did a tremendous job taking a complex story. I thought they would simplify it, dumb it down, you know, make it, you know, sexy appealing. And it is, I'm amazed. I get this all the time. I get questions. People listen to the issues and the data and the story so closely that they've retained it. And that's the credit.

I give him. It's a very sophisticated crime, very complex, and if you watch that, you'll get it. Well, listen, this has been a fabulous experience for me. I appreciate you joining us on Open Book. The title of the book is Madoff Talks, uncovering the untold story behind the most notorious Ponzi scheme in history. And it was written by James Campbell. He's a radio host and an author and a fascinating Ron Contour. I really enjoyed this, Jim. Thank you so much for joining us today. And it was my honor, my honor to be there. You speak a lot of truth to power. So thank you for your time.

Madoff Talks is a fantastic book. It gets into Madoff like nothing I've read before, but it is a study in sociopathic behavior. And it's a study of certain people's willingness to do unbelievably bad things to others. They have a self-justification in their personality. They have, okay, I'm going to do this for a short period of time and then fix it. And then it unravels for them. and it turns out to be this epic tragedy. Now, I know people think this is controversial for me to say this, but Bernie Madoff killed his two sons. Ultimately, it's like the old Greek tragedies, the sins of the

father passed down to the sons, and whether one got sick with the illness of lymphoma and leukemia and eventually died from that or the other, unfortunately, on the second anniversary of Mr. Madoff's arrest hung himself in his apartment, left children. This level of depression, probably came from the crime. I do believe that neither of those children knew about the dad's crimes, which made it even more tragic that way these events unfolded. And what a great job Jim did in terms of getting into the heads of these people, getting them to open up and bring out all the different aspects of this saga and tragedy. I think there's a big lesson in here for all of us, but the number one lesson consistently is you're at your happiest when you're doing the right

thing and you're at your happiest when you're doing the least harm to others. And boy, what a great book. I recommend it to everybody. Hello. Are you ready to be on the show, Marie Scaramucci, or what? Go ahead. Where are you in the city? Do you like how you caught me on the phone this morning, getting the Botox shots on my forehead?

Or no? Again. Come on. Come on. You want me to look old, ma? I mean, come on. Why do you want to look old when you can look less old, right? Well, why don't you let me get them?

You know you get them. You know you get them all the time. Come on. I've had them in almost three years. That's because of you, not me. You can go any time you want, okay? You know that. I'm going to get there.

Should I get... I'll have, no, stop. I'll have Robbie take you into the city. Just let me know. All right. So, Ma, you're ready? Go ahead. All right, you ready?

All right, Ma, you remember Bernie Madoff or you don't remember him? Yeah, of course. He's the one that went to jail for being the scheme artist. Right. Okay. So what do you know about Bernie Madoff? He was a crook. Okay. And he got caught. He ended up going to jail. He died in jail, right?

Right. Okay. So what do you think of these fraudsters, Ma? What's your opinion of them? Of a fraud? Yeah. I think the truth sets you free. And I've always told my children that, including you, because you're my child. And truth sets you free. Okay. And what about Sam Bankman freed, right? You thought you liked him, right? Well, there was a very weird thing about him.

I have a nephew who is ill. and I thought maybe we'd have luck because he was a cold of him. He looks a lot like him. He looks a lot like my cousin Anthony, right? I know. And it threw me off because I thought that maybe he would be a straight shooter. And he would be humble like my nephew. And I went for it.

Okay. So you thought he was a good guy and we got it wrong. He was a fraudster, right? So let me ask you this question. But you're pretty good at reading people. You've always been very good at your whole life reading people. So how do you? How do you get tipped off?

How do you smell on somebody that there are frauds their mom? How do I pick up on it? Right, exactly. What's the antenna that goes up and says, okay, this guy's got something wrong with them? Usually their eyes or tell a story. There's something in people's eyes that are not at a norm, and that's how I pick up. I don't know. I'm pretty good at people.

What is it? It's like a crazy look or it's like a look of lying, the eyes are darting around? What is it? It's, the eyes have like a mysterious look. They don't look like the average person. It's like a mystery in their eyes. Okay. All right.

So when you find out, what do you say to these types of people, Ma? We have to get away from them because they'll drag it down. Right, well, that's for sure. You have to get away from them. No, I got it. But, I mean, but let me ask it differently. So, but there are people like this, right? The realism suggests that, you know, unfortunately, we're going to run into a few people like this in our lives.

right? Yeah, well, that's what makes the world go around. Right. There's all kinds of people, and those people, I don't think there's that many of them, really, but the ones that are like that are the big deals, you know, they're very, they're very scary. They do a lot of damage. They may be a needle in the haystack, but that needle turns out to be more like a sword, right, or a samurai, right?

Absolutely, absolutely. They can chop up a lot of people. Absolutely. I met people like that in the construction business. were nuts. And I could tell that they were off the wall. Right, because they don't really give a shit about other people, right? Right.

They're ruthless, right. And they're, uh, they're teeters, and they're messed up. Okay. And they don't realize they're messed up until they get caught. And when they get caught, they're like grassy for straws, but they usually try to pay their way out of it, the ones that I knew. All right. I love you, Mom.

All right. All right. All right. All right. Okay. I am Anthony Scaramucci, and that was Open Book. Thank you for listening. If you like what you hear, tell your friends and make sure you hit follow or subscribe

wherever you listen to your podcast. While you're there, please leave us a rating or review. If you want to connect with me or chat more about the discussions, it's at Scaramucci on Twitter or Instagram. You can also text me at plus 1, 917, 909-29-9-6. I'd love to hear from you. I'll see you back here next week.