Madoff with the Money by Jerry Oppenheimer

wasn’t much of a player on the eighth-grade softball team. Portnoy, who kept statistics, recalled that in the season’s first three games, Bernie had a batting average of .143, the lowest on the team. When Bernie saw the number, he angrily confronted Portnoy and demanded to know how well Portnoy himself had done at the plate. Portnoy acknowledged he was 0 for 5. When Bernie demanded to know why Portnoy hadn’t listed himself as low man, he explained that the statistics covered only those with 10 at-bats.
    â€œThis answer did not make him happy,” Portnoy noted years later. “He felt that if someone was doing more poorly than he, it should be shown—or, better still, just don’t show anyone with a batting average under .200. The incident showed that Bernie did not appreciate negative publicity.”
    Bernie did a bit better on the basketball court. The eighth-grade team on which he played won the school championship. Bernie and Elliott Olin were the best players on the team, according to Portnoy, who supplied the popcorn for the fans.
    Because his chum Olin was involved in so many school activities, Bernie joined in, too. He served as a monitor, essentially a crossing guard, and proudly wore a white Sam Brown belt that went across his right shoulder and around his waist. As a monitor he was part of a small group of boys who kept discipline in the schoolyard. Bernie also followed Elliott into the Boy Scouts of America—their troop met at the Jewish War Veterans building in Laurelton—and both stayed in scouting through high school.
    Bernie had proudly taken the Boy Scout Oath the day he joined:
    â€œOn my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; To help other people at all times; To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.”
    The first scout law that Bernie pledged to uphold was trustworthiness:
    â€œA scout tells the truth. He keeps his promises. Honesty is part of his code of conduct. People can depend on him.”

    The Alperns—Saul, an accountant who had the demeanor of a college professor, and Sara, trained as a social worker, and their two pretty daughters, Ruth and Joan—moved to Laurelton from Brooklyn when Bernie was starting seventh grade and his future wife was beginning fifth grade.
    Ruthie, blonde and green-eyed, had a sweet nature and a keen sense of style even at her young age. Immediately, she bonded with another neighborhood girl, Jane Silverstein, the equally blonde and cute daughter of a men’s clothing manufacturer. Jane’s father had chosen to move to Laurelton because it was on the train line to Penn Station, which was near his office in the garment district. Jane, whose family had also moved to Laurelton from Brooklyn, was a year older than Ruth and lived two blocks away. The only difference between Jane’s cookie-cutter house and Ruth’s was that the Alperns had a sunroom in back.
    They were two very bright and pretty little girls whose lives would intertwine through the years.
    The Silverstein girl, who lived on 227th Street, had gotten to know the Madoff boy, who lived on 228th Street, before Ruthie Alpern had moved to the neighborhood, on 229th Street. “Bernie was a year older,” she recalls,“and he came to visit with some boys to see this girl who lived down the block who was his age, and that’s when I first met him. He was a popular kid, and he and Elliott Olin were very, very good friends.”
    Ruth and Jane were good friends from fifth through eighth grade at P.S. 156.
    â€œWe were all part of a group. Ruth was a very likable girl who was smart, not bossy, and a good athlete.”
    She also had a prescient sense of style. Few if any Laurelton girls were decorating their own rooms. But Ruthie Alpern had the ability, the creativity, and the family money to do it.
    â€œHer mother actually gave Ruth a budget and she was allowed to