Exclusive: The Secret Madoff Prison Letters

Diana B. Henriques

Bernie Madoff hated e-mail. He rarely used it at his high-tech Wall Street trading firm. When others did, he fretted about the trail it left behind. He wasn’t crazy about letters, either. A staffer had standing orders to destroy his correspondence with one important client. Even after December 2008, when the world learned that ­Madoff had run the largest Ponzi scheme in history, few personal letters surfaced. He always preferred to deal with people face-to-face.

But early in his 150-year prison sentence that all changed. His wife, Ruth, stopped visiting. His estranged older son, Mark, committed suicide; his surviving son, Andrew, never visited and swore he never would. His encounters with the world beyond the prison’s razor-wire perimeter shrank down to occasional meetings with lawyers.

In September 2010, in the first months of this intensifying isolation, Bernie Madoff became my pen pal–forced by captivity to rely almost entirely on e-mail and letters to carry out his last, desperate mission.

That mission: rewriting history–his own history. Where better to start than with his biographer?

I first interviewed Madoff in person at the medium-security prison in Butner, N.C. in August 2010 for my book The Wizard of Lies (Times Books, 2011). It traces the roots of his dishonesty to 1962 and details his many cliff-hanger escapes from detection, his precipitous downfall in 2008 and the epic legal struggle over the wreckage he left behind.

After that first visit–I saw him again early last year– we began to exchange letters. Soon Madoff enrolled me in the closed prison e-mail system. We have corresponded ever since, at least monthly, more often weekly, sometimes several times a day.

Read the rest here.