Robert Ferber's booming, rueful laugh measures his emotional progress since he learned the money he invested with Bernard Madoff was gone.
He's no longer losing sleep. He's counting his blessings, reducing exposure to the stock market and concentrating on running his small cargo logistics company.
Still, much of what he worked for over many years is gone. He won't say how much, except that it's a "significant" part of his worth and "the impact hurts." Ferber founded and sold CarFinance.com in the Internet boom, so presumably he had substantial assets to invest.
"I guess I was initially shocked," he says. "Shocked at first. A little bit of anger. Then a little bit of 'How do we dig out of this?' That's probably a natural process that everybody goes through."
Ferber lives in Baltimore County with his wife and four children and runs his company from the old American Can complex in Canton. Tall, with light brown hair, wearing jeans and crew-neck sweater, he is one of thousands cheated by New York-based Madoff, who moved closer to a plea bargain yesterday by waiving his right to a grand jury.
In some ways, Ferber is unusual. He's not ultra-wealthy like so many Madoff victims (movie star Kevin Bacon, Sen. Frank Lautenberg). He doesn't run one of the numerous nonprofit groups whose endowments have been devastated by Madoff losses. He's from Baltimore, which through luck or smarts has been relatively free of Madoff misery.
But his dollars are just as incinerated as those of the other investors. Like many of them, he's also concerned about recouping taxes paid on Madoff-related profits that were entirely fictitious.
He first heard of Madoff in the 1990s while working in New York. A former Nasdaq chairman, Madoff was "somewhat of a god in the industry" whose fund was very hard to get into, Ferber recalls.
Madoff attracted Ferber and other conservative investors like planets to a black hole. Madoff Investment Securities claimed to produce steady, low-risk returns through a complicated mix of derivatives and blue chip stocks.
"I bought into the concept" because it was similar to what others on Wall Street were trying, said Ferber. "I personally am a low risk-tolerant investor. I was looking for something that, you're not going to try to hit a home run, but you're not going to lose your shirt."
Statements arrived showing returns of about 1 percent a month. It was taxable income, so Ferber and others withdrew cash each year to pay the IRS.
