Madoff Ex-Gal writes tell all book
By David Voreacos and Linda Sandler
Aug. 19 (Bloomberg) – Sheryl Weinstein and Bernard Madoff nurtured a tender relationship that turned sexual five years after Hadassah, the Zionist women’s organization where she was chief financial officer, invested millions of dollars with him.
They kissed and caressed in hotel rooms and restaurants in New York for months until their extramarital affair blossomed one evening in 1993 at the Willard InterContinental Hotel in Washington, Weinstein writes in her new tell-all book, “Madoff’s Other Secret: Love, Money, Bernie, and Me.”
“There was a gentle shyness about Bernie that I found endearing,” Weinstein writes. “And probably most enchanting was the way he made me feel. With Bernie I always felt wanted, desired, and that was an empowering sensation. During the past few months, the thrill — the buzz — of sexual tension had only gotten stronger.”
Weinstein and Madoff had sex in hotels for months before the affair cooled and a warm friendship followed, she says. She trusted him with her family’s savings until Dec. 11, 2008, when he was arrested for running a Ponzi scheme that defrauded thousands of investors of billions of dollars. Rage followed.
“He is a beast that has stolen for his own needs the livelihoods, savings, lives, hopes and dreams and futures of others,” Weinstein said June 29 to a federal judge in New York who sentenced Madoff to 150 years in prison. “He has fed upon us to satisfy his own needs. No matter how much he takes and from whom he takes, he is never satisfied. He is an equal opportunity destroyer.”
Emotional Arc
Such is Weinstein’s emotional arc in recounting her troubled marriage before the affair, Madoff’s courtship of her, her sexual awakening, and her intimate revelations of his shortcomings, both physical and emotional. She and her husband, Ronald, are struggling to recover from the shock of Madoff’s betrayal. She makes clear that she can lay Madoff, 71, bare like no one else, including his wife, Ruth.
Weinstein, 60, begins her story with a February 1988 meeting at Madoff’s midtown Manhattan office with two colleagues from Hadassah, where she worked from 1984 to 1997 after serving as controller of New York’s Lincoln Center. A mysterious donor known as “Albert I.,” who lived in Paris, gave Hadassah $7 million on the grounds that Madoff manage the money.
Weinstein had never heard of Madoff or his firm, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities. After the meeting, he began wooing her in flirtatious ways, and she “felt heat prickle my face.”
Where Weinstein’s husband was bullying and emotionally abusive, Madoff was kind, charming and exciting, she writes. A series of lunches led to one at the Four Seasons, where he professed his desire for an affair. She balked, saying “Adultery is not my thing.” He said “that takes the pressure off,” she writes in a book St. Martin’s Press releases Aug. 25.
Deep Friendship
Their friendship deepened as her career, and Hadassah’s investments with Madoff, advanced. Hadassah said it invested a total of $40 million with Madoff and withdrew $130 million.
Weinstein says Madoff long balked at meeting Hadassah’s financial advisory board, whose members she doesn’t identify. Around 1992, she writes, Madoff said “we’re doing a trade with treasuries” and asked Hadassah to invest. Hadassah agreed.
At that time, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued a Florida investment firm, Avellino & Bienes, that invested $441 million with Madoff. The firm closed the business and refunded investors. After reading in the Wall Street Journal that Madoff was cleared of wrongdoing, she became convinced it was safe to invest her life savings with his firm, she said.
Madoff’s secretary, she says, set up hotel meetings before the Willard encounter and made reservations in person “to ensure that the room would not turn up on his credit card.” Weinstein describes herself as smoking marijuana to relax. Madoff said his wife did too. Weinstein says she didn’t know if that was true.
Great Kisser
By the time they reached the Willard, Weinstein writes, she had learned that Madoff was a great kisser, a bad tipper, a name dropper, and a narcissist who may have obsessive-compulsive disorder or Tourette’s syndrome. At the Willard, Weinstein writes, she learned one of his many secrets that they discussed by telephone a few days later.
“Bernie had a very small penis,” she writes. “Not only was it on the short side, it was small in circumference. That he was now pointing it out to me was telling. It clearly caused him great angst. I wanted to be careful how I responded. Men and their penises have a strange and unique relationship.”
Still, she said: “I liked this man and didn’t want to emasculate him. His tiny penis hadn’t prevented me from climaxing.”
Their encounters were “surprisingly exciting,” she says.
‘On Fire’
“When we made love, I was on fire. Bernie was a release valve, someone I could disappear with for a few hours. Somebody who would say nice things to me and treat me like a lady. He was an older man, and he was chivalrous. He opened doors for me, stood when I entered restaurants and was never short on compliments.”
In the middle of the affair, Weinstein writes, Bernie professed his love for her at the Hilton Hotel.
“Usually, we’d spend three or four hours talking, eating, and making love,” she writes. “I was getting myself together and Bernie was already dressed and pulling his coat from the closet. He was about to walk out the door when suddenly he turned back to look at me. ‘Sheryl, you know I love you.’”
Her fantasies of a whirlwind romance in Europe and staying in five-star hotels began to end. The realities of an affair between two married people took root.
“I knew in my heart of hearts that this was never going to be anything more than it was, simply an affair,” she writes. “But there was a part of me that wanted Bernie for myself. I wanted to be number one.”
After the Affair
After the affair ended, Weinstein rebuilt her emotional life with her husband. He took medication for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and his mood improved, she writes. She took antidepressants. They began to run a commercial laundry trade publication. They refinanced their Manhattan apartment and invested the cash with Madoff.
Weinstein told her husband and their adult son about the affair a month after Madoff’s arrest. Weinstein doesn’t detail how much money she lost to Madoff. She does say she started with $70,000 and added an unspecified sum from her Hadassah compensation in addition to the unspecified mortgage money.
“In order to move forward, I decided to tell my story,” she writes. “I truly hope Ronnie will be able to forgive me for sharing these private moments in our lives.”
Peter Chavkin, a lawyer for Ruth Madoff, said she knew nothing about the “alleged affair.”
That should remind people who say Ruth Madoff must have known of her husband’s fraud that “there are some things that some spouses, however close they are, do not share with each other,” Chavkin said.
Madoff’s lawyer Ira Sorkin didn’t immediately respond to a call and e-mail seeking comment. Last week, he said Weinstein was “entitled to her free speech. Why one would go public with something like that, I don’t know. She’s entitled to say anything that might be deemed derogatory about herself.”
To contact the reporters on this story: David Voreacos in Newark, New Jersey, at dvoreacos@bloomberg.net; Linda Sandler in New York atlsandler@bloomberg.net.
