“He didn’t show any remorse. He wasn’t emotional. He was like a financial serial killer,” says finance journalist and veritable Bernie Madoff expert Erin Arvedlund in MADOFF: The Monster of Wall Street. The documentary series, premiering Jan. 4, details the Wall Street billionaire’s rise to power, fraudulent investing tactics and eventual downfall. In the four-part deep dive by Academy Award nominee Joe Berlinger (Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile), journalists, victims, whistleblowers, investigators and Madoff’s former employees recount how the money-hungry investor pulled off the biggest Ponzi scheme in history.
MADOFF: The Monster of Wall Street is available to stream Jan. 4.
Watch the MADOFF: The Monster of Wall Street trailer below.
An American financier, Madoff committed the largest investment fraud to ever happen in the US — cheating tens of thousands of investors out of nearly $65 billion. A stockbroker, adviser, former NASDAQ chairman and securities company founder, Madoff helped countless clients grow their funds — but it was all a lie: “Madoff never did any investing for his investment advisory business. It involved simply taking people’s money, telling them he was going to invest their money, and he never did,” Madoff trial expert witness Bruce Dubinsky says in the docuseries. After his 2008 arrest, Madoff left many victims in his wake, several of whom died by suicide or suspected suicide in the aftermath of devastating financial collapse. Sentenced to 150 years in prison for 11 felony charges, Madoff died in 2021 from natural causes.
The series examines Madoff’s infamous crimes and how countless systemic oversights led to a failure in preventing them. His victims and those who sought to bring them justice shed light on Madoff’s decades-long grift.
While Madoff’s victims were all over the globe, his career began and ended in New York City.
MADOFF: The Monster of Wall Street director Joe Berlinger also created the Netflix true-crime documentary anthologies Crime Scene and Conversations with a Killer. Most recently, he directed the latest installments of both: Crime Scene: The Texas Killing Fields and Conversations with a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes.
