Madoff with the Money by Jerry Oppenheimer Page A

decorate her own room, which was really forward thinking,” remembers Jane Silverstein Kavanau, Joe Kavanau’s wife of some 50 years. “Ruth picked out nice things. She had very good taste, innate good taste. She always looked good.”
    (Years later, as Mrs. Bernie Madoff, Ruth would be intimately involved in not only her husband’s business affairs, but also in the decorating of their many fabulous properties.)
    For several summers, the two girls, Ruthie and Jane, went to an eight-week camp together, and were bunkmates. “I had gone to the camp for many summers and somehow or other Ruth found it interesting because I was so enthusiastic about it,” says Jane Kavanau. “She spoke to her mother, and they met with the camp director and her parents decided to send her.”
    The camp was not inexpensive, but the Alperns could well afford it. Saul Alpern had a knack for making money and generating clients. Down the road, he would become one of Bernie’s unofficial first feeder funds.
    During Ruth’s first summer at coed Camp Adventure, on the shores of Great Pond in bucolic Ridgefield, Connecticut, she set her sights on a boy, but not just any boy. His name was Bobby Dworsky and he was the son of the camp’s owners, Bill and Ida Dworsky. Ruth, who would next set her sights on the Madoff boy, knew instinctively back then that it was important to be with a powerful male; in this case it didn’t hurt that as the owners’ son, Bobby had the run of the place, and Ruth was able to benefit from his perks. Ruth and Bernie—they’d be known that way as a team throughout their lives together—had not yet set each other’s hearts aflutter, so the Dworsky boy was Ruth’s boyfriend at camp.
    The girls’ last summer together at camp was in 1954, beginning a slight hiatus in their relationship because Jane left P.S. 156 to commute to a private day school on Long Island called Woodmere Academy, where she’d complete her high school education and meet her future husband. They’d pick up again when both were young marrieds.
    Bernie and Ruth, meanwhile, had seen each other around P.S. 156, but being two years younger, she wasn’t of much interest to him romantically. He had also gotten to know her because their fathers had become friends—their talk about money and how to make it being one of Saul Alpern’s and Ralph Madoff ’s mutual interests.
    Unlike many of the other Jewish and Italian girls at P.S. 156 who possessed stereotypically ethnic features, the Alpern girl had a blonde, WASPy look about her—the flaxen hair, fair skin, and green eyes. In today’s world she’d probably be an Abercrombie & Fitch or Ralph Lauren girl, but with one big difference—an identifiable Queens accent. She looked nothing like either of her parents, neither of whom were especially attractive. Ruth’s older sister, Joan, was pretty, but not on a par with her sibling.
    Jane Kavanau remembers a day when she and Ruthie went to buy some candy at Hamils on Merrick Road, and the proprietor was shocked— shocked —to learn she wasn’t a gentile because of her goyish look.
    â€œThe person who owned the candy store asked her, ‘ Why are you wearing that ?,’ pointing to the little gold Star of David she wore on a delicate chain around her neck. So Ruth said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Why are you wearing that Jewish star?’ And Ruth said, ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ He said, ‘But you’re not Jewish!’ But she was of course.”
    Years later, remembering those days, Kavanau notes that Ruth Alpern “looked like a shiksa. She did, absolutely. I did also but not as extremely shiksa-looking. Ruth and I used to mix our blonde hair together and you couldn’t tell whose hair was whose. We used to kid around. We had long hair and we would make ponytails and mix them together and they’d all