August 23, 2011 – The documentary feature Chasing Madoff, telling the frightening true story behind the Bernard Madoff scandal, opens August 26 in New York, Los Angeles, and other select cities.
Bernard Madoff is an American former stock broker, investment advisor, and the mastermind behind what has been described as the largest Ponzi scheme in history. Madoff is now serving 150 years in prison. His release date is listed as November 14, 2139. (A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns not from actual gains but from the investor’s own money and of more recent investors. The scheme is named after Charles Ponzi, whose operations made him infamous in the United States in 1920.)
In March of 2009, Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 federal felonies and admitted to turning his business into a massive lie that defrauded $65 billion dollars (including fabricated gains) from thousands of investors. (The actual losses were estimated at $18 billion.)
Chasing Madoff tells the story from the point of the view of a team of investigators, lead by Harry Markopolos, who tried for a decade to expose the truth behind Madoff’s practices, in an unpopular and unsupported campaign that no one wanted to listen to.
With Markopolos and the actual members of his team, the film is comprised of personal interviews accompanied by illustrative scenes that reveal the lack of government oversight and the lack of ethics in the financial industry. It is a serious, depressing even, expose on people’s greed and lack of scruples, sprinkled with humorous statements from a rather quirky Markopolos.
Chasing Madoff is 91 minutes long, not rated. It was produced, written, and directed by Jeff Prosserman, based on the New York Times best seller No One Would Listen written by Harry Markopolos.
Chasing Madoff opens Saturday at the Laemmle’s Monica 4-Plex in Santa Monica and at Laemmle’s Music Hall 3 in Beverly Hills. See more info here.
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