Tens of billions of dollars is hardly chump change, but then Bernie Madoff is no chump. He is the Wall Street fraudster who master-minded the most heinous swindle of our generation, until it all unravelled during the market crash of 2008.
Now Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer have teamed up to tell the true story, behind the headlines, of Madoff's deceptions, lies and betrayals in The Wizard of Lies, a TV movie that has its premiere today on OSN First HD, Home of HBO.
De Niro slips into the skin of the con man who raked in an estimated US$65 billion (Dh239 billion) from investors during his elaborate Ponzi scheme, a fraud he sustained for decades while keeping his wife, Ruth (Pfeiffer), and their sons, Mark and Andrew, in the dark about his crimes.
"Bernie Madoff's greed brought down and destroyed his entire family," says executive producer and Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson, whose credits include Hollywood hits such as Diner (1982), Rain Man (1988) and Wag the Dog (1997).
“This is a dangerous character. He doesn’t have a gun. He’s not going to shoot you. But he could destroy your life.”
For De Niro, 73, it was an eye-opener to see how Madoff operated and “the way he conned everybody by not conning them – by just being so removed – and let them come to him”.
The film is based upon The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust, a 2011 book by The New York Times investigative reporter Diana B Henriques.
Pfeiffer, 59, says: “It was unrelenting to see what these people go through and how it affected everyone – and for me, Ruth, mostly: she lost everything in a day. It was all taken away from her.
“Ruth Madoff was villainised ... Everyone turned against her. Her children stopped talking to her. She was completely isolated.”
In preparing for her role, Pfeiffer decided not to seek a meeting with Ruth Madoff – “I didn’t want to contribute in any way to the victimisation that she had already been through” – but circumstances and opportunity changed her mind.
“I was encouraged to reach out to her, and she said she would meet me, so I spent a little time with her,” says Pfeiffer. “And she was incredibly generous, really gracious – a little guarded, understandably so, but I spent a lovely hour with her.”
In preparing for his role, De Niro took a methodical approach.
“I read several books by family members – and, of course, the Diana Henriques book on which it was based,” he says. “I met certain people who worked with him, and knew him.
“I didn’t meet him ... it just somehow felt it’s too difficult to meet him – although I would have loved to.”
Pfeiffer’s on-screen appearances have been few and far between in recent years.
"I've never lost my love for acting," she recently told Vanity Fair. "But I was pretty careful about where I shot, how long I was away, whether or not it worked out with the kids' schedule. And I got so picky that I was unhireable. And then ... I don't know, time just went on ... I disappeared, yeah."
A comeback is in the works. Her upcoming movies this year include filmmaker Darren Aronofsky's Mother!, with Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem; and Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, co-starring Johnny Depp and Penélope Cruz.
And what of the man whose crimes inspired the film? Madoff, now a 79-year-old, resides far from his former palatial homes in Manhattan, Long Island, Palm Springs and Cap d’Antibes in France. He is inmate #61727-054 serving a 150-year sentence in the Federal Correctional Complex in Butner, North Carolina.
“People are greedy,” Madoff told author Henriques during a 2010 interview. “I told everyone, ‘Don’t put more than half of your money with me – you don’t know, I could go crazy’.”
For Madoff to accuse others of greed seems insane – but De Niro doesn’t think the crook is mentally ill.
“It doesn’t explain anything to say he’s a sociopath.”
Instead, De Niro wonders if the people around him simply looked the other way.
“Everyone probably had an idea ... but they didn’t want to look too deeply,” he says.
• The Wizard of Lies screens at 11pm today on OSN First HD, Home of HBO. Also available on demand
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