Becoming a Stockbroker
Bernie Madoff was born on April 29, 1938, the second child of Ralph and Sylvia
Madoff.3
Ralph and Sylvia, married at the nadir of the Great Depression in 1932,
were children of eastern European immigrants who had fl ed the anti-Semitism—
persecution and murder of people who are Jewish—in their homeland. The family
lived in a small lower eastside Manhattan apartment. Following the bi rth of Peter,
their third child, in 1946, Bernie’s parents bought a small home in the Laurelton section
of Queens. Laurelton was a predominantly working-class Jewish community
near what is now Kennedy Airport.
Ralph worked, mostly off-the-books, as a plumber. The IRS found out, ordered
him and two partners to pay $13,000 in back taxes (equivalent to $103,000 in 2010
dollars),4
and placed a lien on his home. In the late 1950s, desperate for money,
Ralph and Sylvia, a homemaker, opened Gibraltar Securities. The business was registered
in Sylvia’s name to protect its assets from the IRS. Sylvia obtained a stockbroker
license, but not an investment adviser license. Ralph had neither license.
A stockbroker and an investment adviser differ according to the type of obligations
they have to clients. An investment adviser has a fi duciary duty to always act in
the client’s best interest. A stockbroker, on the other hand, is a salesman who brokers
a deal between buyers and sellers. A stockbroker must provide the client “suitable
advice,” which may not necessarily be the best advice.5
In 1959, while majoring in political science at nearby Hofstra College, Bernie
made a series of decisions that shaped the rest of his life. First, he decided that he,
too, wanted to become rich working as a stockbroker. Second, he married Ruth, his
high school sweetheart, and they moved into an inexpensive one-bedroom apartment
in Bayside, Queens. Third, two days after the wedding ceremony, he registered
Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities as a brokerage firm with $200 of assets and
no liabilities. Bernie had $5,000 in working capital, money he saved from summer