Invested: The Rule #1 Investing Podcast

If you haven’t heard the news already, Bernard Madoff has just passed away at the age of 82 in a federal prison hospital in Butner, North Carolina. For more than 50 years, Bernie Madoff was renowned on Wall Street as a big money manager who founded his own firm at age 22 and became non-executive chairman of the Nasdaq in 1990. Madoff was famously known for running the largest and possibly most devastating Ponzi scheme in financial history. He defrauded thousands of investors out of tens of billions of dollars over the course of about 17 years. Madoff was busted on December 11, 2008 after his two sons turned him in.  Victims included director Steven Spielberg, actor Kevin Bacon, former New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon, Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Weisel, as well as ordinary investors like Burt Ross who lost $5 million in the scheme.  In a 2013 email to CNBC from prison, Madoff mentioned that the break in the market that started the Great Recession led to his scam. “I