Somewhere back around 1946 or 1947, Nick Etten–by now a pretty much forgotten first baseman for the Yankees–signed a one-year contract in the amount of $15,100. This sum struck many observers as an odd number, but not one canny New York baseball writer, possibly Red Smith. “The $100,” he wrote, “is for fielding.”
That pretty much sums up my reaction to the 150-year prison sentence handed out to Bernard Madoff. As I assay the punishment-to-crime ratio implicit in the judge’s decision, I attribute 25 years as penal recompense for Madoff’s particular peculations–his swindling of a few thousand institutions and individuals–and the balance of 125 years as society’s get-even for Wall Street’s recent crimes against humanity, for which Madoff can stand as an almost perfect symbol.
We cannot get at Stanley O’Neal, or Jimmy Cayne, or Joseph Cassano and his merry band of AIG rogues, or Dick Fuld–men whose actions and recklessness ultimately led to the destruction of trillions of dollars of personal wealth and the hopes and necessities that wealth was intended to underwrite and secure.
We cannot get at Goldman Sachs, which seems about to report as profitable a quarter as any in its history, a fact which, under the circumstances, will rank, if true, with the greatest moral obscenities and perversions of process I have witnessed in what is now starting to feel like quite a long life.
But we can get at Bernard Madoff, and if he must stand proxy for the fury we feel at Wall Street, and for our frustration that the real malefactors not only seem beyond adequate punishment, but are being rewarded with non-dues-paying membership in a tight little club of taxpayer-financed vulture finance, then so be it: 150 years and every penny for Madoff, not a nickel nor a month from the real bad guys.
This is not to say I don’t feel Madoff’s victims’ pain. Not possibly, not to that extent, to be sure. I am not bankrupt. But every morning now, when I arise, the first thing I do is some simple arithmetic that suggests I no longer have resources adequate to get me to my grave, assuming the actuarial tables are correct. Until last December, I never heard the name “Madoff.” I owned good stocks. The people who advised me never for one second showed themselves deficient in intelligence or good faith. And yet here I am.
Is Bernie Madoff Really Worse Than Dick Fuld? – Michael Thomas, Forbes
