For a large segment of the American Jewish community, the Bernard Madoff scandal will always be a Jewish saga.
Not so much because of the losses suffered by individual investors in the multibillion-dollar fraud, for there were plenty of non-Jews (especially overseas) among the victims.
Furthermore, we’re not privy to personal tragedies unless someone divulges their situation in a private conversation or to a reporter or television camera.
The more public and arguably more shocking aspect of Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was the damage done to Jewish organizations and charities that entrusted funds to him. It was unfathomable, and unforgivable, that a Jew had inflicted such harm on his own community.
Jewish viewers might be surprised, therefore, that the valuable documentary “Chasing Madoff” omits all Jewish connotations with the Wall Street money manager.
“At the end of the day, there were a lot of wealthy Jewish people that lost a lot of money,” director Jeff Prosserman acknowledges in a phone interview. “As part of getting this story out there truthfully and openly, we didn’t want to make it a story of greedy Jewish people and how they swindled each other.”
It wouldn’t be an accurate reflection of the scale of the scam in any event, the Toronto-born, New York-based director asserts.
“As we dug a little deeper than the headlines,” Prosserman says, “Madoff was the tip of the iceberg. In doing the research, and going through all the documentation and discovery of all the firms involved and all the investors involved, we realized this in fact is not a Jewish story.”
Consequently, it was an easy decision for Prosserman to steer clear of the public perception of the scandal as the handiwork of a Jewish financier.
“We realized we had access to so much documentation that we could expose a whole other
layer of this story,” he explains. “Rather than focusing on Madoff the man or his background, we decided to focus on Harry’s investigation, and the scope of what he uncovered, including the hundreds of firms who aided and abetted Madoff’s scheme. That’s the true injustice.”
Harry Markopolos was working for a Boston-area investment firm a decade ago when his boss asked him to analyze — and match — the returns that a potential client was getting with his New York money manager. In a matter of minutes, Markopolos determined that the large, consistent earnings didn’t jibe with the real world, and could only be the result of cooking the books in some way.
He embarked on a crusade to unravel the truth about Madoff’s business model, starting with discreet interviews with his peers in the investment world. Markopolos eventually passed his information to respected financial journalists and his sources to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC’s years-long failure to investigate the labyrinthine plot, and its lethal laxity in protecting investors, has yet to be fully explained or punished.
“When we started [the film], we didn’t know the scope of how many people were inept or corrupt,” Prosserman explains. “No one had gotten to the bottom of it yet. Everyone in the press was talking about how much money was lost. We thought there were some compelling human stories.”
“Chasing Madoff” blends the factual rigor of “Inside Job,” the Academy Award-winning film about the 2008 financial crash, with the kind of stylish recreations favored by documentary icon Errol Morris. The 28-year-old Prosserman, who came to movies from the world of advertising, includes a few snippets of Madoff’s voice culled from old interviews, but relegates the one-time heavyweight to the shadows.
“As a Jew, it creates an opportunity [for me] to clear the air and take a step away from the prejudice surrounding the scandal,” Prosserman says. “The last thing that I wanted to do was fuel prejudice.”
“Chasing Madoff” opens Friday, Sept. 9 at the Metreon in San Francisco and the Shattuck in Berkeley.