User:Lilduff90/Mark Madoff (temp)

Mark Madoff (March 11, 1964 - December 11, 2010) was an American economist and financier, best known for his role in exposing his father, Bernie Madoff's elaborate multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme.

Biography
Madoff was born on Long Island in 1964, the oldest of two sons to Bernie and Ruth Madoff. He earned a Bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Michigan in 1986, and joined the Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity there.

Madoff eventually began working alongside his younger brother, Andrew, in their fathers firm, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC running the firms trading arm, a division seperated from the then-ongoing and unknown Ponzi scheme. Madoff married twice, and had a son and a daughter from his second marriage. He lived in Manhattan, New York with his family at the time of his death, his estate then amounting to $18.6 million.

Exposing his father
Unbeknownst to his sons, Bernie Madoff had been using the wealth management arm of his firm to run a Ponzi scheme since the late 1980s, before they began working there, a scheme that remained undiscovered despite several investigations. By the mid-2000s several sources reported red flags on Madoff's business, and he was close to collapse in 2005, but managed to keep the scheme afloat until it began unraveling in 2008 as a result of the Financial_crisis_of_2007–2008. By December that year, Bernie Madoff knew that keeping the scandal under wraps was becoming near-impossible and confessed to his brother Peter, Mark and Andrew's uncle, that the firm was on the brink of collapse.

On December 10, Madoff suggested to his sons, Mark and Andrew, that the firm pay out over $170 million in bonuses two months ahead of schedule, from $200 million in assets that the firm still had. Unaware of the firm's pending insolvency, they confronted their father, asking him how the firm could pay bonuses to employees if it could not pay investors. At that point, Madoff asked his sons to follow him to his apartment, where he admitted that he was "finished", and that the asset management arm of the firm was in fact a Ponzi scheme – as he put it, "one big lie".

While he intended wind up the firm's operations before his sons alerted authorities, asking them to give him one week to do so, they immediately called their lawyers, revealing their father's plan to use the remaining money to pay relatives and favored investors. Madoff was arrested the following morning.

Death
Madoff first attempted suicide in 2009, but survived. On December 11, 2010, the two year anniversary of his fathers arrest, Madoff committed suicide in his Manhattan apartment. He was 46 years old, and survived by his wife and two children. In a suicide note written in 2009, and his unfinished memoir, Madoff cites his fathers crimes as a leading reason behind his suicide, writing "My own father has stolen my life from me. It's pain that is beyond description. The business that I spent twenty-three years building gone, I am unemployed, my livelihood destroyed, and my family will forever live with the shame of what my father has done. There are so many victims of my father's fraud, so many horrible stories. How do I explain to my children what I do not understand myself?>ref>[Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2011/10/25/mark-madoffs-unpublished-memoir-my-father-has-stolen-my-life/]"

In 2012 Madoff's ex-wife and widow, Susan Elkin and Stephanie Mack, were sued by Irving Picard, the trustee for his father's swindled clients, under a claim they should have known their wealth was based on crime.