" No smart buyer should buy gemstones based on in-house reports or appraisals done by the seller " : Renee Newman GG
CHAPTER 1: YOU ARE THE BRAND
A lot of sales professionals think that people buy because of the reputation of their firm or their products.
Wotta buncha dopes!
Product branding and corporate branding might convince people to buy laundry detergent, but when if you’re gonna sell something that’s complicated — especially if it’s too complicated for the customer to easily understand — then you, my friend, are the brand.
Yes, the customer is buying YOU — who you are, how you look, how you talk, how you act, and what you say. All the rest of that branding stuff is just so much bull puckey.
Look, the only reason that anyone is going to buy anything complicated from YOU (as opposed to the guy down the street) is that the prospect thinks you’re better, smarter, and more reliable.
That means that YOU gotta be the expert. YOU gotta to have the right appearance. YOU gotta know when to talk and when to shut the heck up. It’s all about YOU.
So forget about that marketing budget. Forget about that pricey ad campaign. Forget about the product, even.
Heck, if you make yourself enough of a brand, you can even sell something that’s completely impossible, like stock investments that consistently pay double digit returns year after year.
You can even get government regulators to act like braindead nodding bobbleheads. [[Note to lawyer: OK to put in book?? B.M.]]
Brand. It’s all about YOU. Don’t ever forget it.
Born
April 29, 1938 (1938-04-29) (age 71) Queens, New York, USA
Charge(s)
Securities fraud, investment advisor fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering, false statements, perjury, making false filings with the SEC, theft from an employee benefit plan
Penalty
Sentencing scheduled for June 29, 2009; maximum sentence of 150 years in prison and $170 billion in restitution
Status
Inmate #61727-054 at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, New York City, NY.[1]
Occupation
(former) Stock broker, financial adviser, former chairman of NASDAQ
Spouse
Ruth Alpern Madoff
Children
Mark Madoff (ca. 1964), Andrew Madoff (ca. 1966)
There are at least 13,500 reasons why Bernie Madoff is staring at a 150-year jail sentence...
There are at least 13,500 reasons why Bernie Madoff is staring at a 150-year jail sentence when he appears at Manhattan's federal courthouse later today. That is the estimated number of victims (no one knows for sure) of the 71-year-old fraudster who operated the world's biggest ever Ponzi scheme and who came to personify the crooked face of the credit crunch. Many of his victims lost their entire life savings, placed into Madoff's clutches at the promise of 10 to 12 per cent returns.
One was Alexandra Penney, the former editor of Self magazine who is also an artist and a photographer. Since being impoverished by Madoff she has focused on "earning some money" by writing a blog on her experiences – The Bag Lady Papers – on Tina Brown's website, thedailybeast.com, and has since signed a book deal with Voice, the Disney imprint.
"He is very much a symbol of greed and of arrogance, which have hurt so many people. But in a country like ours, particularly with a global instantaneous news cycle, people like Madoff can be gone in a nanosecond," she explains. "I think Americans are famous for moving on. I think the healthiest one can say is OK, he's gone, and let's hope they get whoever else was complicit with him."
Miss Penney, who has not only lost her savings, but may also have to sell her artist's studio in Manhattan, is not prepared to move on just yet, however. "There is no closure to someone whose life has been subject to the catastrophe of Madoff. Each time I speak about him or write about him, it seems so toxic, it is almost like reliving the moment I found out. But maybe when he has gone to jail, I won't have to talk about him so much, and I can try to forget about all this and maybe move on."
Madoff's lawyers want a 12-year sentence for their client; but prosecutors say they still don't know the full extent of his crimes. "There are still so many answers that are unknown," said Richard Greenfield, a New York attorney who represents two dozen victims. "I had fully expected by now – seven months after he confessed – that the government would have filed an indictment naming some of his co-conspirators."
Questions remain over the involvement of his family in the fraud, given that Madoff's business was very much a family affair. His brother Peter, sons Andrew and Mark, and niece Shana held senior positions in the Madoff empire, but, according to the man himself, they knew nothing of his operation.
Even his wife, Ruth, who has agreed to forfeit the couple's four homes and $80 million (£48 million) of her remaining $82.5 million fortune, worked at the business on occasion, but apparently knew nothing.
Although no family members to date have been accused of any wrongdoing, there is a growing belief among those who have followed the case that both criminal and civil investigators will widen the net once Madoff is sentenced. There are a lot of people who want to see the back of him. He pleaded guilty at his recent trial and denied the country a full explanation of how he carried out his crime. A Ponzi scheme, named after the early 20th-century fraudster Charles Ponzi, is a fake investment operation that pays returns to investors from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors, rather than from any actual profit earned. It relies upon greed and gullibility, but it must be believable to attract a sufficient number of people.
Madoff's returns were not exceptional, but for 10 years, federal regulators failed to investigate tip-offs the Securities and Exchange Commission had received about him. Whether they were introduced to Madoff by friends or sought him out, investors were attracted by one simple thing: his ability to earn steady higher-than-average returns, year in and year out.
While Madoff is guaranteed a place in the pantheon of American financial miscreants, can he be said to personify the era of American excess which led to the banking crisis that brought the world's financial system to the brink?
"It is not American excess, it is worldwide excess," says Dr Mirjana Blokar, a New York-based psychiatrist. "What America made possible is for someone like Madoff to rise to such prominence."
Although Dr Blokar attests that Madoff is a "product of our times" in the way in which he was able to swindle so many people out of so much money through the lure of high annual returns, she believes it was his "chutzpah" that made it possible for him to get away with it for so long.
As for why people do not appear to be blaming the ills of the economic downturn on him – given the lack of any other major villains, with the exception of the accused $7 billion fraudster Sir Allen Stanford – she argues that Americans on the whole tend to believe in redemption, and no matter how badly someone has behaved, rehabilitation is always possible.
"Being a larger-than-life personality seduces you into all sorts of things," says Dr Blokar, citing the past misdemeanours of Senator Ted Kennedy and former President Bill Clinton, and the way in which they have managed to reshape themselves in the collective psyche.
Madoff, in spite of his failings, embodied a certain element of the American dream, however flawed the outcome. A young Jewish man from Queens, New York, who toiled in manual jobs to enter the glamorous world of Wall Street, he not only made himself money over the years, but helped to make a lot of other people very rich for a time.
In essence, he was a macher – the Yiddish word for a big shot. That he eventually made a lot of his friends very poor, has, in the collective psychology of a country too often focused on wealth, been somewhat forgotten.
Before he was unmasked, Madoff was largely unknown. Even many working on Wall Street had not heard of him. He did not work for a well-known company, and as such has not been vilified in the way that the heads of certain banks, such as Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, have been for seemingly triggering the crisis itself. Nor has he been disparaged in the way that insurer AIG was for paying $165 million in bonuses to staff who caused its near-collapse and subsequent $180 billion government bail-out.
Because of the way Madoff operated, his was very much a private crime, affecting only those who had substantial amounts of money to invest in the first place, leading to a certain lack of sympathy towards some of those who lost out. Equally, the legal process since his confession has made it easier to put his deeds to the back of the collective mind.
Apart from a few early court visits to discuss bail and his subsequent house arrest, and his plea hearing in March, Madoff has not been seen in public. Add to that the fact he has not faced trial because of his confession, it is perhaps unsurprising he has not received the visible pillorying by the media that people in his situation tend to face.
Madoff and Sir Allen Stanford, the Texan billionaire who last week pleaded not guilty to masterminding a $7 billion fraud at his financial empire, are as different as night and day. Not only was Sir Allen known to the public for his flamboyant lifestyle, his love of fine property and for sponsoring major sporting events, his first action after being charged by America's leading financial regulator for the fraud was apparently to go on the run.
That it turned out he had been at his girlfriend's house in rural Virginia all along did not appear to matter to the media, and what has followed has been a veritable circus of emotional television appearances, consistent denials, and a late-night arrest, all topped off by his appearance in an orange jumpsuit and manacles at a Houston courthouse last week.
To date, the Madoff case has provided none of this, and even today, which is likely to be his final public appearance, there is no certainty that he will be seen outside Manhattan's federal courthouse – which is linked by tunnel to his detention centre. Even if he is, a judge has given him permission to wear one of his trademark grey suits.
That the American public is even being denied a "perp walk" – the US police practice of parading a criminal outside a court, dressed in prison clothes and handcuffed – by Madoff says everything.
"I think the American public knows this guy's a crook and that he's taken from all his friends. I don't think they need to see the mugshot," says Tom Buchanan, a former assistant US Attorney, who is now chair of Winston & Strawn's Washington litigation department.
"Once he gets taken away, that'll be enough."
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A Letter To MadoffDear Bernie Madoff:
I don't think you know what you have done.
Life inevitably inflicts upon us different kinds of wounds. Very few people can live connected lives and not occasionally fail those who depend upon them and trust them. However, these are failures not betrayals. They come from trying to do the right thing and not being able to do it. A betrayal is different than a failure. A betrayal is an intentional wounding. It is born of cruelty, not ignorance. Most of us know of failures and betrayals. What you have done, however, is to radically expand the scope and viciousness of betrayal. You betrayed not just your friends, but your closest friends. You betrayed the trust of those who entrusted you with everything they had saved. You betrayed charities whose good works you have extinguished in an afternoon. These betrayals are epic in their scope and dazzling in their utter lack of remorse or responsibility.
There must be some new word invented to describe the way you have redefined betrayal. The Bible calls such things a toevah, "an abomination". It means an act so alien to our values and our natures that it cannot be understood or explained. You have committed an abomination. This is what you have done.
Another thing you did was make life incredibly more difficult for people who sell real and honorable and legitimate money products. Now every stock broker and money manager and hedge-fund operator and insurance rep who has already had a tough time convincing prospective clients that what they are selling is good and honest must now also convince them that they are not like you. An entire world economy we now know is based to an immense degree on simple trust, and you have done more than any single person to destroy that trust. You are a financial terrorist. Your attack has toppled the foundations of trust in our financial markets. Although you are not by any means the only financial terrorist, you are its most reviled attacker. What has brought us down are not worthless financial instruments, but worthless people. Many business people have always known and have never forgotten that trust is all the collateral they have ever placed against a loan. Your name is on people's lips now, but the ones out there selling honest products at a fair price ought to push your name into the gutter where it belongs. This is what you have done.
One of the very worst things you did has to do with the Jews. You are responsible for reviving the "Jew game." I heard of the Jew game from a boy who became a man last Saturday. I asked him once if he had ever experienced anti-Semitism in school. That is when he looked at the floor and told me about the Jew game. The game, played by anti-Semitic kids in school, was one in which they would hide around a corner, throw a quarter down the hall, and then when somebody picked up the quarter, they'd run at the person, shouting, "You're the Jew!"
You did not cause the anti-Semitic insults about Jews and money, but you caused them to be revived. Not since Julius Rosenberg spied for the Soviet Union has one person so damaged the image and the self-respect of American Jews. I am not comfortable with the fact that so many of the articles about you specifically identify your prominent place in the Jewish community. Ken Lay of Enron shame was never identified as a "prominent Protestant energy broker." The most aggressive accusers of the governor of Illinois seldom describe him as "the prominent Serbian-American governor of Illinois." Yes, it is unfair that your Jewishness has become part of the storyline. But you just reminded the bigots who grew up playing The Jew Game that it still strikes a familiar chord. You wiped out Joe Lieberman's accomplishments. You revived ancient bigotry against our people. You gave credence to the horrid accusations about Jews being untrustworthy and greedy. One offensive paper has a column called "Jews in the News," which focuses on some Jewish criminal or other to remind their sickening readers of the legitimacy of anti-Semitism. You are not just one of the "Jews in the news" they seek. You are the apotheosis of their hate-filled world. You have given the Jew-haters material for a decade of hate gardening. You single-handedly revived the Jew game. This is what you have done.
Most of those you've deceived will learn to live and give in new and perhaps more modest ways. Unlike your evil, which has been stopped, nothing will stop their courage and compassion. Some of your victims will no doubt be more severely wounded in circumstance and in spirit, but none of them, I pray, will surrender to your assault. Their friends will not leave them. Their children and grandchildren will not refuse to hug them and kiss them. After their initial trauma subsides, they will, I believe, move on to cling to the blessings that cannot ever be stolen.
You, on the other hand, will lose everything-everything! From this day to the end of your life, there will be none who will trust you. To be mistrusted by everyone is an enormous curse and you have brought this all upon yourself, and for what purpose? You were supposed to be the master of risk and reward and you risked everything from everyone for what reward? You have not just made a bad calculation about how money works, you have made a bad calculation about how life works. You gave no value to what matters and all value to what does not matter at all. This is what you have done.
Shame on you Bernie Madoff. Shame on you.
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