The Madoffs Were Strangely Free With Money
Two years ago it was probably really sweet to have Bernie Madoff give you a corporate credit card you could use to waste tons of money. Today, you'd wish you hadn't bought all that crap:
Turns out that Madoff gave out corporate Amexes to most of the people in his family who quote-"worked"-unquote for him and his fake firm, and in the course of their fake work for his criminal enterprise, they charged a lot of bullshit to the company. As did he!
Purchases ranged from big-ticket items, like the $2,000 dropped by his wife, Ruth, at the Giorgio Armani store in Paris, down to the $8.11 niece Shana Madoff spent on Starbucks coffee...
One shows that when son Andrew Madoff dined at the famed Per Se restaurant, he left a measly tip — 5.6 percent of his $1,066.41 tab, or $60.
The company also paid nearly a million bucks for membership in three separate golf clubs. Notice the common thread here? They overpaid for every single thing (down to the coffee) except what they could have been forgiven for overpaying (the tip). The lesson here is, don't charge anything to your company that you wouldn't think was reasonable if you were paying for it yourself. Unless your company is a massive Ponzi scheme that could be exposed at any moment. In that case, live it up, fuck it.
[NYP, WSJ]