04:25 pm - an answer, maybe not the answer I've been wondering why Bernard Madoff would so calmly plead guilty to so many counts of securities fraud, wire fraud and money laundering and accept the possibility of several consecutive life sentences. This Vanity Fair article gives me a lot of ideas why he'd want to be somewhere behind a lot of concrete, where the people he defrauded couldn't get to him. He didn't just lose the money of rich people who could afford it -- he looted and lost *all* the money of people who had trusted him enough to invest everything they had. And he defrauded a huge number of charitable foundations that supported hospitals and a lot of other "good works" organizations. The story is incredible. Read it.
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