The Madoff creep show

What's worse than a money manager who swindles his clients, friends and relatives of $20 billion? How about a son of the swindler who tries to capitalize on his father's crime by writing a book about it?

Or how about the swindler's wife, who emerges from nearly three years in seclusion to grant TV and newspaper interviews in order to promote her son's new book? How about a revered TV news program that actually granted a showcase to this creepy family?

What Joseph Welch asked Joe McCarthy at the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954 might well have been asked Sunday evening of "60 Minutes," of Bernard Madoff's wife Ruth, and of their surviving son Andrew and his witchy so-called fiancée, the mascara queen Catherine Hooper: Have you left no sense of decency?

Apparently even "60 Minutes" isn't above trying to grab some Nielsen points, trotting out its grey eminence Morley Safer and his cool neckties to put a patina of respectability on what was, finally, a total creep show.

Her last $2.6 million

I'd love to play poker with Ruth Madoff; I'd win all of her remaining $2.6 million"“ poor baby"“ because, while I'm no FBI profiler, she was all "tells" Sunday night, batting her eyes like hummingbird wings when Safer asked her the hard questions, and clutching the arms of her chair so hard that I expected sawdust to spill between her fingers.

Maybe she wasn't lying when she recounted her sufferings at the hands of her husband and erstwhile friends, but Ruth's version of the truth would make a locomotive take a dirt road. I had to laugh at how shocked, shocked she was that she received hate mail and angry phone calls from people who had only lost their whole lives at the hands of her husband.

The show did provide a good"“ albeit brief"“ glimpse into the soul-less patriarch of these ghouls: Bernie Madoff himself. Repeated clips of Madoff in his totally inappropriate black baseball cap shoving a reporter, a look of totally clueless arrogance on his permanently pinched face, gave me, at least, the impression that this fellow would take the pennies off a dead man's eyes and then look around for a blind man with an exposed pencil cup to steal.

To his credit, the reporter pushed Madoff back, only much harder. If only the SEC had done that early on, we wouldn't have had to put up with this prime time nonsense. Who says there's no honor among thieves?

Prison haircuts?

To judge from this show, Madoff's son Andrew appears to be training to follow in his old man's footsteps, even to the extent of letting his hair grow in the devil's wings that Bernie still sports, even in stir. Whatever happened to prison haircuts?

Andrew has his father's same feral pinch to his face; he even has a good woman at his side"“ a woman who seemed to be salivating in anticipation of the necrological returns on the Truth and Consequences, the young Madoff's apologia that, astonishingly enough, was officially released on Halloween. If Andrew is ultimately skinned for everything he has in court, the proceeds from the book will likely go to the good Catherine, who, based on the evidence of "60 Minutes," will spend it on eyeliner.

And, oh, yes, the Madoffs' other son, Mark, hanged himself last December on the second anniversary of his father's arrest, while his son was sleeping in the next room— one more victim of his father.

Ruth told Morley Safer that losing a son to suicide was terrible, although she couldn't work up any tears. Indeed, she seems as dry and sterile as the moral desert of the Madoff landscape.

The Madoff saga is one of total shame, one that "60 Minutes" is now sharing.♦


To read responses, click here.