A Tragedy In Two Acts
It was a tragedy played-out in two acts.
Through decades.
Perhaps three or more generations.
Every counselor or priest who’s been “on the job long enough” has the story that will stay with them forever.
Here’s mine.
ACT 1:
“Back in the day,” the Florida Department of (In)Corrections – the prison system - had a contract with a local hospital to provide housing and critical medical attention for seriously ill inmates. “The system” had exclusive access to a full floor and the entire range of medical and surgical services. My role included almost daily visits, administering sacraments when requested, serving as liaison for inmates’ families, and – more often than not – just listening.
The most valuable – humane – members of the team were the nurses. (I will always remember and be grateful for a Jewish grandmother who – year after year – worked extra shifts so others could spend Christmas with their families.)
Even more difficult than notifying families of the death of a husband, son or brother was speaking with an inmate about death and end-of-life decisions – to resuscitate and initiate extra-ordinary measures or keep him comfortable and as pain-free as possible as death approached. Usually, the issue began with a charge nurse telling me “Father Flynn, you need to talk to him and get him to sign releases” – nurse-talk for a “Do Not Resuscitate” order.
It was the early ‘90s. IV drug use was ravaging the nation and HIV/AIDS were rampant in Florida’s prisons
“Father Flynn, could you please get him to sign a release.” For more than a week the request – a gentle demand – greeted me every time I walked off the elevator.
Night after night, I stood in almost complete silence beside the man’s bed. There was none of the idealized “priestly ministry to a dying man.” No speaking of God or prayer. He wanted nothing to do with me and even less to hear anything I might say.
Night after night, the nurses’ empathy and voices became more strained. “Father Flynn, he’s receiving eight to ten units of whole blood a day. Sometimes more. And he’s bleeding out… even through his skin.”
The inmate was adamant. “I know I’m dying and I’m gonna cost the state every penny I can.” Words and a snarl I remember thirty years later.
Finally, a nurse pleaded, “If he were a dog, we would have put him down long ago.”
That night, the man was angrily, eerily silent. Even refusing to acknowledge my presence.
He died the next day.
ACT 2:
I was at my desk in the Chaplain’s Office when a young – maybe mid-20s, blonde-haired prisoner walked in.
“Did you know So-and-So?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me how he died?”
“I’m sorry. There’s privacy laws… I can’t.”
“I want to know how he died.”
“I wish I could tell you. He died at a hospital in South Miami.”
“How did he die?”
There was a breath-stealing pain in his insistence.
Finally, “I can only tell you his was the most horrific death I’ve ever seen.”
“Good. He was my father and he was a son-of-a-bitch. Good.”
And he was gone.
The evil that claims the souls of bad people spills out and pollutes almost everything it touches.
_____
Beyond anything else, the young prisoner’s father was assuredly a liar. Only lies – constant, repeatedly, without end, spirit-deadening - could provoke such anger.
The Merriam-Webster online Thesaurus lists somewhere around one-hundred synonyms for schmuck, including: vulgarian, lowlife, scoundrel, rascal, and miscreant. They all apply to the New York sleezeball and liar.
Unhappily, even MW can’t produce a sum-it-all-up word for this evil doer who laid waste to his victims and serves as a contemporary example of evil’s destruction. His frauds claimed friends, relatives and country club acquaintances. He called himself a philanthropist, yet ripped off investors, defrauded major charities with promised donations and returns-on-investments that never came through, and bamboozled New York and federal regulators.
He nurtured a deep reservoir of trust that spanned the globe – from New York and Palm Beach to nations and organizations large and small – and, despite the recession of the early 1990s, a global financial crisis in 1998 and the terrorist attacks on his allegedly beloved New York in September 2001, he managed to masquerade as a winner.
The financial meltdown that began in the mortgage market in mid-2007 and eventually drowned hedge funds and institutional investors resulted in something akin to a “run” on Bernie Madoff’s personal (yet fictitious) bank. On December 10, 2008, sons Mark and Andrew confronted their father over a plan to give bonuses to employees ahead of schedule and Bernie, quickly running out of cash, ‘fessed-up to his “one big lie.” He was a fraud, he told his family.
That same day, his sons went to the police.
Finance and investment genius Bernie Madoff was arrested the next morning.
“No other white-collar case is comparable in terms of the scope, duration and enormity of the fraud and the degree of betrayal,” observed Judge Denny Chin during Madoff’s sentencing hearing.
From start to finish and everywhere in between Bernie Madoff was a shyster (also spelled schiester, scheister, shyster).
At least on paper, his thousands of victims lost $64.8 billion dollars - $64,000,000,000, including the fictional profits he had credited to customer accounts over at least two decades.
In the immediate aftermath of the revelations about his Great Lie, at least two people suddenly facing penury after the loss of their life’s savings committed suicide. Others lost their homes. Many victims experienced the loss of trust and their relationships with family members and friends whom they had convinced to invest with the conman. The Department of Justice’s Madoff Victim Fund estimated there were 38,000 casualties of his Big Lie.
In the legal entanglements that followed the December 11, 2010 news of Madoff’s Big Lie, son Mark was represented by attorney Martin Flumenbaum, who described his client as “an innocent victim of his father’s monstrous crime.”
On the second anniversary of Madoff’s arrest, Mark used a black dog leash attached to a metal beam on the living room ceiling of his New York apartment to hang himself.
Mark Madoff’s two-year-old son was asleep in an adjoining bedroom when his father killed himself.
In his last written note, Mark told Flumenbaum “no one wants to believe the truth.”
The New York Times reported that in the weeks before his death Mark Madoff had been in “an increasingly fragile state of mind” and
“had expressed both continuing bitterness toward his father and anxiety about a series of lawsuits that were filed against him, his brother Andrew and other family members… Mr. [Mark] Meadows was particularly upset that the trustee [representing some of Bernie Madoff’s victims] had named his young children as defendants in a lawsuit… seeking to recover approximately $200 million that the family had received in salaries, bonuses, expense-account payments and gains in their own investment accounts at the Madoff firm. Mr. Madoff was particularly upset that the trustee had named his young children as defendants….”
Son Andrew Madoff had been battling cancer since 2003 and blamed the stress of his father’s Big Lie and the resulting scandal for the return of his mantle cell lymphoma. He died on September 3, 2014 at age 48. He once told a writing seminar at Princeton University, “My father is dead to me” and described his father’s fraud to The New York Times as “a father-son betrayal of biblical proportions.” A week before his death, he told the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center/Hutch News Stories, “I think that there’s no question in my mind that stress plays an enormous role in your body’s ability to fight disease. There’s absolutely a connection between the massive amounts of stress and the reason I relapsed.”
Peter Madoff, Bernie’s brother, was sentenced to a 10-year prison term in December 2012 and forfeited all his personal property to compensate his brother’s victims.
In February 2022, Bernie Madoff’s sister Sondra Wiener and her husband died in an apparent murder-suicide in their Boynton Beach, Florida home.
In 2019, Bernie Madoff sought a commutation of his sentence from then President Donald Trump, whom he knew through his Mar-a-Lago estate and other situations; in a 2008 interview with CNN Trump referred to him as a “sleazebag” and “total crook.”
Months prior to his death, Madoff appealed to the U.S. Justice Department for “compassionate release” and, in telephone interviews, told The Washington Post he had “made a terrible mistake” and “I’m terminally ill. There’s no cure for my type of disease. So, you know I’ve served. I’ve served 11 years already, and, quite frankly, I’ve suffered through it.”
The man who bilked thousands of investors in 49 states and more than 120 countries died of hypertension, atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease and chronic kidney disease in the Federal Medical Center (prison) near Butler, North Carolina on April 14, 2021. He had served eleven years of his 150-year sentence.
His body was cremated.
“Do not lie.”
Leviticus 19:11
“I hate and detest falsehood…”
Psalm 199: 163
“The Lord detests lying lips…”
Proverbs 12:22
“The righteous hate what is false,
but the wicked make themselves a stench
and bring shame on themselves.”
Proverbs 13:3
“You belong to your father, the devil,
and you want to carry out your father’s desires.
He was a murderer from the beginning,
not holding to the truth,
for there is no truth in him.
When he lies, he speaks his native language,
for he is a liar and the father of lies.”
John 8:44
Lies kill.
The Sackler Family and their Purdue Pharma’s Lie that OxyContin would not lead to addiction became the booster rocket to the nation’s opioid nightmare. The Lie has led to more than half-a-million deaths since OxyContin was launched in 1996. Because of the Lie inestimable numbers of children have lost a parent or been orphaned. Because of the Lie, loving grandparents will be the only parents that some children will ever know.
Politicians – including presidential candidates – Lie without shame when they accuse librarians and teachers of “grooming” children with the same books many of those same politicians read in grade and high school.
Corporate and governmental “leaders” spread a Great Lie when they deny or challenge the reality of Global Warming.
Governors Lie when they campaign as “pro-life” but sign death warrants.
Politicians Lie when they declare themselves “pro-life,” preach “Life beings at the moment of conception” and then try to figure out whether a four- or twelve -or sixteen- or twenty-four or thirty-six-weeks-from-conception limit on abortions will get them the most votes.
A thrice indicted president and his “co-conspirators” who bellowed “voter fraud” and cajoled and persuaded others to sign-on as “alternate electors” in a scheme to undermine American democracy Lied.
As kids we were taught it’s a sin to lie.
“The wages of sin is death…”
St. Paul to the Romans 6:23
Today, “the wages of the Great Lie is Death.”
Officer Brian D. Sicknick of the Capitol Police was attacked by the Lie-fed mob committed suicide hours after.
Officer Jeffrey Smith of the Metropolitan Police Department killed himself after the attack.
Officer Howard S. Liebengood of the Capital Police died by suicide four days after the attack.
Benjamin Philips, a rioter, died of a stroke.
Rosanne Boyland was crushed to death in a stampede of her fellow rioters.
Kevin D. Greeson died of a heart attack on the west side of the Capitol.
Ashli Babbitt was fatally shot by a Capitol Police officer as she attempted to break into the House chamber.
It is impossible to calculate how many families have been destroyed because Americans from almost every state responded to the Great Lie and its invitation: “Statistically Impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”
Those who perpetrated and perpetuated – and perpetuate – the Great Lie will forever be responsible for the lives lost, the families destroyed by legal defense costs and prison terms, and children’s loss of parents and family security that will reverberate through generations
Yes, the wages of the Big Lie is death.
In the Justice of the All-Just God, the Liars of our world – Putin and his cronies, the Uyghur-oppressing Xi, Nicaragua’s Ortega, Cuba’s Castro brothers and Diaz-Canel, Venezuela’s Madura, and the indicted and named and so-far unindicted/unnamed of January 6, 2021 – will be judged not only on their lies but for the suffering they have caused.