I just can't avert my gaze from the train wreck wrought by Bernard Madoff, the aptly named investor who may have scammed as much as $50 billion from a clientele that included Hollywood, media and sports moguls and major Jewish philanthropies.
I'm riveted by all the gory details: the way people angled to join the Palm Beach Country Club (entry fee: $300,000, plus matching donation to charity) just for the chance to meet and possibly invest with him; how he now might be trying to hide assets by mailing off Cartier and Tiffany baubles and a pair of $200 mittens - $200 mittens? - to relatives.
But beyond the voyeur factor, I think I'm also reading all the coverage with an eye toward evidence that I wouldn't have fallen for Madoff's scheme. Nope, too smart, too cautious, too duly diligent - or, more likely, too cash-poor to have met his minimum investment requirement in the first place.
After talking to Dominic Lynch, though, I think I may be too confident.
"Well, I tell you, when you meet someone like that through a friend, and it's like, this person's done great for us, that's the beginning, and it just goes on from there," he said. "He would be there at parties, he was friendly, Tom Clancy would be there. I never saw anything that looked like a problem."
Lynch is not talking about Bernard Madoff, but he could be. Instead, he is talking about Richard Scott, the man to whom he turned over a nearly $400,000 nest egg.
Scott turned out to be running a fraudulent investment scheme out of a coin-and-stamp store, Goldie's, that he operated in a faded strip mall in Southern Maryland.
I met Lynch about 13 years ago, when another reporter and I were writing about Scott, who ultimately pleaded guilty to securities fraud; authorities estimated that he had cheated some 100 investors out of more than $8 million.
(Because of ailing health, he was allowed to serve a sentence of 18 months of home detention in his Alexandria, Va., home rather than go to prison.)
Reading over some of those stories, I was struck by the similarities to Madoff's much larger and more notorious operation - the clubbiness and intimacy between client and investors, the dash of celebrity provided by the Maryland-based author that gave the operation a sense of legitimacy and, most of all, the way Scott was able to fool so many otherwise smart and savvy people. In addition to Clancy, his victims included a Harvard mathematics professor and a former investigator with the wartime predecessor of the CIA.
