Marlene Wagman-Geller

       A passage from the Biblical Mark poses the question, “For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” A twentieth-century man turned a deaf ear to this advice, and in the process, he sacrificed his soul-along with his wife’s- the dethroned Park Avenue Princess.

      Another Biblical quotation, one from Saint Teresa of Avila states, “Answered prayers cause more tears than those that remain unanswered.” This truth was something Ruth Alpern learned, a lesson that came with a steep price tag. She was born into a Jewish family in Queens, the daughter of Saul, an accountant, and Sara, a housewife, younger sister to Joan. Her parents, after years of saving, moved from their Brooklyn apartment to a modest clapboard house in Laurelton. However, the Alpern daughters’ wish-upon-a star desire was to live in the affluent suburb of Belle Harbor where doting dads did not worry about the cost of weddings. The girls attended Far Rockaway High where Ruth, a beauty, a cheerleader and honors student, was known as “Josie College,” a 1950s yearbook colloquialism that pegged her as preppy, bright, and going places. 

      The defining moment in Ruth’s life occurred at age fourteen when she met the sixteen-year-old Bernie Madoff who lived two streets away. The freshman and the junior were so inseparable their classmates referred to them as “eggs and bacon.” No one was surprised when the sweethearts married at the Laurelton Jewish Center immediately after graduation.

      The couple started with five hundred dollars and rented an eighty-seven-dollar-a-month apartment in Bayside, Queens, replete with one bedroom and a schnauzer named Muffin. Bernie had endured his father’s bankruptcy, and the horror provided the fuel that drove his desire for financial success. Ruth and Bernie attended college, and Bernie worked as a part-time sprinkler installer. After obtaining their degrees, Ruth devoted herself to raising their sons, Andrew and Mark, while Bernie began an eponymous investment firm. His earliest champion was his father-in-law, Saul, who, before retiring to a condo in Florida, entrusted his money to Bernie’s care.  The young financier became a wunderkind, and with the sun never setting on a bad day on Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, people shelled out their savings. Improved finances allowed the family to relocate to a bigger apartment in Great Neck, Long Island, and then to a ranch house in Roslyn. The girl who had once dreamt of moving to the right side of the tracks in Queens began to collect properties as other women do charms for their bracelets: a beach house in Montauk, a penthouse in Manhattan, an apartment in France, a mansion in Palm Beach. Other perks of being Mrs. Midas were a 10.5 carat diamond ring, a $36,000 sable Russian coat, and a yacht christened Bull.

          Contrary to Bob Dylan’s lyric, “I’m helpless like a rich man’s son,” in Ruth’s tsoris-free life, Mark graduated from the University of Michigan and Andrew from the Wharton Business School. When their sons shopped for homes, they did not have to contend with starter digs; they settled into mansions, compliments of the Bank of Bernie. Queens resounded with the wail of mothers whose daughters had attended Far Rockaway High-why hadn’t they snagged Bernie?

         Life for Mrs. Moneybags was a dizzying agenda of flitting amongst her various pleasure domes, decorated with the best of everything. When living on the West Coast, Ruth frequented the Palm Beach Country Club whose initiation fees are in excess of $300,000. On her New York home turf, she embarked on the life of a Manhattan moneyed matron: hair appointments at Pierre Michel Salon where Giselle-a colorist profiled in Vogue-applied foils to attain the shade of Soft Baby Blonde. In her quest to sip from the Fountain of Youth, one of the duties of a manager in the Madoff London branch was to keep Ruth supplied with Boots No 7 Protect & Perfect Beauty Serum. Ruth maintained her one-hundred-pound frame by boycotting carbohydrates; after she had consumed her allotted portion, she poured copious amounts of salt on her food to prevent furtive bites. Despite being a nucleus of the glitterati, Ruth’s North Star remained her husband. In Stepford style, she devoted herself to making his life comfortable: she dressed in the clothes he found flattering and would not tolerate hearing a word against him. When someone “kibitzed” Bernie was a “shyster,” the feisty girl from Queens emerged, her nails turned to talons. She decorated their Xanadu properties to his exacting standards and made sure his boxer shorts were custom-made with buttons up the side as he disliked elastic. Ruth had a charmed life-until her handsome prince transformed into a dark knight.

        In December 2008, Bernie confessed to his family that his financial kingdom consisted of smoke and mirrors and that he had been running a sixty-five-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme. Allegedly Ruth asked, “What’s a Ponzi scheme?” Whether or not she knew, the answer lies in the gray domain of conjecture; however, Andrew and Mark understood all too well. The sons, the embodiment of the first syllable of their surname, went into survival mode. They feared as they worked in the family firm and enjoyed jet-setting lifestyles the eye of suspicion would land on them; the sins of the father would be visited on the sons. To deflect guilt, they contacted the FBI and slammed out the door of the family penthouse, forever departing their vanished world. One can only imagine the torture Ruth endured waiting for the morning arrival of the police who would sever her from the side of the man for whom she had lived for fifty years. The seven-million-dollar art-filled home replete with a thirty-five-thousand-dollar Persian carpet, $104,000 silverware, and an Impressionist painting had dissolved into smoking guns of guilt. Like Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, Ruth’s list of enchanted objects began to diminish.

           Bernie left jail on a ten-million-dollar bond and spent hours in front of the television, eyes streaming tears.  On Christmas Eve, pilloried in the court of public opinion, alienated from their sons, with the loss of their fortune and with prison looming, the Romeo and Juliet of corporate greed lay down on their canopied bed-with God knows what thread-count sheets- and swallowed handfuls of Ambien. Fifteen hours later they awoke feeling groggy and decided to shoulder on. When news broke of the aborted double suicide attempt, the public felt the Madoffs were being manipulative in a ploy to garner sympathy. One victim stated that people who are smart enough to pull the wool over the eyes of millions were smart enough to know how many sleeping pills to swallow to get the job done. The couple became the primary punching bag of the country; there was no empathy for the fallen Caesar- or Caesar’s wife, who was not beyond suspicion.

         With the carpet of her life pulled out from underneath her, Ruth became Mrs. Job, and she experienced the veracity of the adage “Whom the Gods wish to punish, they first make happy.” The initial kidney punch to her soul was the loss of all her gilded cages, seized as restitution to the victims who had been swindled in the largest financial scam ever perpetrated. New York had not experienced such a suspect wealth on the auction block since the Philippine government auctioned off the contents of Imelda Marcos’s Upper East Side townhouse. When Ruth attempted to rent a modest home, the notorious-by-husband association caused landlords to pull out the Not Welcome mat. At age seventy-one, Ruth had to resort to couch-surfing, but almost the only offer to lay her hat came from Joan in Boca Raton. The sisterly solidarity was all the more remarkable as Bernie had lost Joan’s life savings, and in her seventies, she survived by driving airport taxis. As Florida was as rife as New York with victims, even her gynecologist’s mother was bilked, Ruth went out incognito: gone were the Soft Baby Blonde highlights, and she went by her maiden name. While the world had once been her oyster, post-scandal Ruth received the Casey Anthony treatment. Moreover, the U. S. Attorney’s office put a moratorium on her spending, rejecting her New York Times subscription as too extravagant, along with TV service above basic cable. Although Ruth had escaped imprisonment, she lived in a stockade.

         Worse than the loss of property and reputation was when her boys forced her into a Sophie’s Choice: choose Bernie or her sons and grandchildren. Despite the ultimatum, Ruth was not willing to put asunder the marriage vows taken in the Laurelton Jewish Center. Conjugal fidelity, normally a quality of admiration, only made her a further target of poisoned darts. A newspaper referred to her as Ruth-less and a barrage of bloggers wrote, “Burn the witch!” A much better publicity ploy would have been to claim she had been as duped, and therefore as victimized, as everyone else. Placing her heart above her head, she drove a 1996 Infiniti clunker to North Carolina to see Bernie, whose name had become synonymous with “greedy dirt-bag,” inmate Number 61727-054. She said of these heart-wrenching encounters, “It was like having a husband who had died but you could still visit.” However, since Bernie had been the pillar of her world since her early teens, she did what she had always done and stood by her man. Perhaps in a nod to “honor among thieves,” Bernie steadfastly insisted on going down solo, placing blame only on his own shoulders.

           Further condemnation fell on Ruth’s former baby-blonde highlighted head when she fought to hold on to a chunk of her wealth; most people felt instead of doing so she should have been knee-deep in mea culpa, ladling soup for the lepers of Calcutta. She ended up cutting a deal with prosecutors to keep two and a half million dollars in exchange for surrendering a potential claim to eighty million dollars in assets. While it saved her from having to take a greeter job at Walmart, it was still a huge blow for a woman who had enjoyed laissez-faire with her gold American Express. She tried to justify her payoff by presenting herself as a 50s housewife who left the family finances to her husband. She stated, “The man who committed this horrible fraud is not the man whom I have known all these years.” The public’s response echoed the name of the confiscated Madoff yacht-Bull. Comedian Andy Borowitz parodied her words, “This is not the man I owned nine homes with. When you spend hundreds of millions of dollars with someone, you think you know him… I guess I was wrong.”

         Although Ruth had paid dearly for her years of living the uber dulce vita, her past sorrows were rank amateurs to what loomed. She was in Boca Raton when she received a phone call that Mark had hung himself with his dog Grouper’s leash in his six-million-dollar Soho home while his young son slept in the adjoining room. Ruth let out a primal scream. The salt she had poured over food was now poured on her own wounds. In the Old Testament, the relationship between Naomi and her daughter-in-law Ruth was forged in steel; not so with the modern mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. When Ruth flew to New York, the widow barred her from the funeral service. 

         However, it was not the loss of her fortune, the public condemnation, or the suicide of her first-born that led to her decision for the eggs to be sans the bacon, (in light of what transpired Ruth was the eggs.) In 2009, Sheryl Weinstein, a former executive of Hadassah, a Jewish charity that had been the victim of the Madoff swindle, published a kiss-and-tell-book that disclosed she and Bernie had shared more than a kiss. Bernie refuted the accusation, but Sheryl had revealed info only the wife of a monogamous man would know-he wore boxers with buttons.

           Shakespeare’s Hamlet observed, “When troubles come, they come not in single spies/But in battalions.” After Mark’s suicide and her final break with Bernie, Ruth reconnected with Andrew. The reunion coincided with a resurgence of her son’s cancer that had been in remission for years. He attributed his illness to his father who had ruined their lives. He called the Ponzi scheme a “father-son betrayal of biblical proportions-” one which had killed his brother quickly and was killing him slowly. What was left of Ruth’s world shattered with his death. Bernie had destroyed many families but none worse than his own. When the robber baron suffered a heart-attack behind bars, the New York Post wrote, “Apparently, Bernie Madoff does have a heart.”

        If the Ponzi scheme had been one of biblical proportions, so had Ruth’s punishment; she had lost her husband, sons, social standing, and fortune. Ruth, the modern Icarus, had flown too near the sun, and her fall from grace was as dizzying as her rise.

     The question remains if Ruth really was a member of the clueless wife’s club. On the one hand, she may have been like another bottled blonde-Carmela Soprano-who had looked away from her husband’s machinations. If that is the case, then her suffering is the gods dishing out her just dessert. However, if she had been kept in the dark, then she is a woman more sinned against than sinning. In either contingency, money, the biblical root of all evil, is the thread that runs through The Book of Ruth.