Joe Nocera, Columnist

The Big Winners in Madoff’s Fraud Make a Deal

Ezra Merkin put his investors' money into a Ponzi scheme, but he gets to stay rich.

June 15, 2018 at 4:10 PM UTC

Joe Nocera is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He has written business columns for Esquire, GQ and the New York Times, and is the former editorial director of Fortune. He is the host and writer of the Bloomberg-Wondery podcast "The Shrink Next Door."

The big loser.
Photographer: Chris Hondros/Getty Images

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So far as I can tell, there are two winners in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme, which surely ranks as the greatest financial fraud of all time.

The first is the law firm of Baker Hostetler. Headquartered in Cleveland, the firm had a tiny New York presence before a lawyer named David Sheehan lured his friend Irving Picard to the firm in December 2008 — which happened to be the exact moment Madoff was exposed as a crook. Picard was quickly chosen by the government to be the trustee of the Madoff bankruptcy.