Eric Konigsberg has a piece on the front page of the Times today about Walter Noel, a big loser in the Madoff tank. Noel lives in Connecticut and is club friends with a John J. McCloy, whose name resonates, and there is talk of Greenwich, the social diary, a Stanford White house near Lake Agawam, George Ball, Christmas cards, Town and Country, Mustique, the daughter in London married to the Italian.... You got it. The whole nine yards of the WASPocracy, which I guess still runs the country. Or used to, I don't know.
I'm an old friend of the talented Konigsberg. So I know that he's just a couple degrees of separation from Ezra Merkin, another Madoff fish, whose sister, the redoubtable Daphne Merkin, is a bigtime New York writer known most of all for her piece on spanking in the New Yorker. Ezra's a big Zionist. Daphne digs Israel too. All I'm saying is there is a Jewish social universe of considerable interest within the Madoff story. Madoff had his fancy clubs, and his Mortimer Zuckermans, and Lappin Foundations for the interruption of intermarriage...
I know the press can do WASP social shtik. Can it ever do Jewish social shtik, when it matters?Thanks to James North for the headsup.
P.S. Joachim Martillo informs: Walter Noel's daughter Alix is married to Philip Jamchid Toub, who is the son of Said Toub, who is apparently of Iranian Jewish background and quite wealthy. It's all very assimilated. Alix and Philip were married in a Methodist ceremony, but the Toub connection would probably still open a lot of doors.
I'm beginning to see Bernie Madoff as a metaphor for the whole Neocon debacle. Someone achieves respectability through competence in one endeavor [broker dealer operation for Madoff, the establishment of the Israel Lobby/AEI/news and media network as premier influencer for the Neocons], followed by expansion into far riskier areas beyond core competency [hedge funds for Madoff, US foreign policy strategic planning for the Neocons], with initial success in the expansion area driven by outsized marketing talent, but marred by a shared tendency to hide what they were really doing in order to enhance an aura of specialness. And then persuading or deluding themselves that they are smarter, wiser, and more competent than everyone else, in part because they are the only ones who really know what they are doing. By the time the mismatch of talent and ambition becomes apparent, it is too late, and the tendency to hide the ball extends the time to resolution, and therefore the size, of the problem that must now be cleaned up.
How were we to know the intelligence was wrong? How were we to know that Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme? Due diligence, and good journalism, cannot function while wearing blinders. At least Maddof has now confessed his fraud. In a perfect world, the whole platoon of Neocons would acknowledge that their own failings created havoc. Instead, we just get them pointing fingers at each other.
Said Toub was an associate of Robert Vesco and helped Vesco in at least one piece of the complex fraud of which Vesco was accused.
Vesco was supposed to have embezzled almost $500 million in the 1980s, and the sum was considered spectacular back in those days.
On the tapes, Nixon called Vesco "a cheap kike," which this author finds to be evidence of "antisemitism."
Jeffrey Tucker (Noel's partner) is Jewish