People Can Be Evil

I just read two different books about evil people. The first person I had never heard about: Mark Anderson. The second one, of course I had: Bernie Madoff. I grabbed the book about Anderson from a box in my neighborhood by Frances Dinkelspiel:

I had known about Bernie Madoff for a long time, and I paid attention to the story when he was arrested in 2008 and charged with running a Ponzi scheme. This book was one that my wife checked out of the library for me, and it was by Diana Henriquez:

I have read a lot of books over the past couple of years and have shared some reviews here. Just like I don't write about every walk I go on, I don't write reviews of every book that I read. This is the first time I have reviewed two books at a single time. They aren't exactly related, though I did just read them back-to-back.

Mark Anderson

I had never heard about this crime, which took place near Sausalito, California in October 2005. The crime was the burning of a wine warehouse. The fire, set by the owner of the warehouse, Anderson, ruined 4.5 million bottles of wine value at more than $250 million. The author has a personal stake in the story, as here great-great grandfather, an immigrant from Germany, was the creator of some of those bottles.

Dinkelspiel does an excellent job explaining why Anderson burned his storage business: to cover up his theft from his customers over time. He had sold their wine and kept the money for himself! She also points to how Anderson took his father's money. The author conveys the pain and suffering of the customers who lost their wines, and she does a good job of detailing the investigators and prosecutors.

Anderson was sent to prison for 27 years, but he was released due to poor health. He died at age 74 in March 2023.

Bernie Madoff

Madoff, who died in April 2021 at the age of 82, was serving a life sentence (150 years). Most know this story: Billions of dollars turned out to be missing from thousands of people. Madoff had been a highly respected person, helping to found the NASDAQ.

Henriques helps explain how secretive and controlling Madoff was and how the Ponzi scheme played out over time, sometimes under threat of falling apart. There were some who thought early-on there was fraud, but the SEC failed to ever move forward. Then 2008 hit. Bear, Stearns was forced into a sale, and Lehman went bankrupt. There were so many problems in 2008 that Madoff's scam fell apart. He pled guilty three months after confessing in December 2008 and was sentenced in June.

The author does a good job of explaining how difficult it was to wrap things up. Who lost how much money was a tough question to answer. She also did a good job of discussing the key players and how some of them may have known it was a scam all along. I liked that she told of the suicides that took place too.

My Takeaways

As I wrote above, these two stories were not at all related. One scam was in the wine industry in California, and the other was on Wall Street in NYC.

I never heard about the Anderson story, but I have been to Sausalito and love San Francisco and the California wines. The very large man (350 pounds ultimately) was really into sushi and wine. There is so much more to life! The part of this story that excited me was how people fell for Anderson's b.s.

I was very aware of Madoff and saw him on CNBC a lot. I never cared for him - too famous, too well liked! Wow were people wrong about him. It didn't take too long for the world to realize the love for Bernie was misguided.

I worked on Wall Street from 1986-1992 at Kidder, Peabody. Talk about scams! I turned in my boss for embezzlement, and the firm blew up when a trader, Joe Jett, took advantage of a glitch in the computer system there and lost $350 million of phony profits. I was rubbed wrong by Wall Street for these reasons and many others. Bad people doing bad things and getting paid a lot and getting rehired by others.

These two books show that evil goes beyond just Wall Street! I don't think that the whole world is evil, but there sure are some really evil people.