I’m sitting again in the jury selection room of the main state civil court building in downtown Manhattan, while in the federal court building next door Bernie Madoff has just pleaded guilty to all manner of horrific deeds (worst among them of course mail fraud). There were a bunch of TV crews on the steps of this courthouse as I entered—I’m hoping it’s because it provides a more expansive courthouse-steps backdrop than the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse does, and not because they don’t know where the Madoff hearing is.
The guilty plea is of course horribly anticlimactic. I even read something a couple days ago (I looked online for it just now but couldn’t find it), where a lawyer for some of Madoff victims said Madoff was cheating by pleading guilty. Hmmm: Pleading guilty to all the crimes of which you were accused doesn’t really seem like cheating. Madoff, after doing enough cheating for several lifetimes, has apparently decided there’s no point trying anymore.
But this doesn’t mean the Madoff legal saga is over. It’s not even close. In fact, most of the really interesting stuff remains to be revealed in or out of court. There’s the involvement (or not) of his wife and kids. There are the cases of Walter Noel and Ezra Merkin and all the other “feeders” who steered billions into the Madoff sinkhole. There’s the reexamination, which has only just barely begun, of what role federal regulators ought to play in regulating private investment funds like Madoff’s. And there will surely be lots, lots more (there’s already a Madoff Case Global Alliance of Law Firms pleading for the creation of an International Finance Court to handle all the border-crossing litigation). So much more that, in few years, we’ll all be totally sick of Madoff-related court cases.