Madoff with the Money by Jerry Oppenheimer Page B

look the same color.”
    Ruth had several attributes going for her when she and Bernie started seriously dating when she was a freshman in the class of 1958 at Far Rockaway High School and Bernie was a junior. She had the shiksa look, but was Jewish; she was very social and outgoing, which was the opposite of him; she had a fashionista’s sense of style—very preppy; and her father, Saul, was a shrewd and creative accountant who always had his eye on the dollar. Beyond that, Ruth herself was bright, and was a whiz at one particular subject in school. And that subject was math. She knew her numbers and how to work them.
    Ruthie Alpern had all the right stuff for a fast-track operator like Bernie Madoff, who had dreams of becoming a Master of the Universe in the gilded canyons of Wall Street.

Chapter 3
    Bernie Hobnobs with the Wealthy, Strong-Arms Some Pals, and Courts “Josie College”
    Bernie Madoff had a choice of two public high schools after graduating from P.S. 156 in June 1952—Andrew Jackson or Far Rockaway, both of which were in the Laurelton district. With his mediocre grades, he never would have made the cut for the elite public secondary schools such as the Bronx High School of Science, or Brooklyn Technical, where his brother, Peter, would be accepted.
    Bernie chose Far Rockaway primarily because it attracted a relatively affluent, fast-track crowd. The other option, Andrew Jackson in St. Albans, Queens, was garnering a reputation as a Blackboard Jungle sort of school.
    As Jay Portnoy, who commuted on the 20-minute train ride to Far Rockaway with Bernie and Elliott Olin, observed, “St. Albans was becoming New York City’s first suburban American black area,” drawing kids from poor neighborhoods, “which scared many of Laurelton’s liberal Jewish parents.”
    However, many of those same parents, like Ruth’s, had low-paid black maids— schwartzes , they called them—working either full-time or part-time in their homes.
    â€œThey were bringing young girls, young black women up from the South to work in the houses,” says former Laureltonian Marion Dickstein Sherman, a doctor’s daughter, whose family had a live-in black maid. Sherman, who was a classmate and sorority sister of Ruth’s, observes, “Andrew Jackson was getting a little scary. It was low-income, scary black.” But she points out that the decision for her to go to Far Rockaway had nothing to do with any form of discrimination, just perceived danger. “That was the feeling.”
    Bernie’s four years at Far Rockaway were for the most part uneventful, except for his social climbing.
    Just like he bonded with popular Elliott Olin at P.S. 156, the likable kid from Laurelton began rubbing shoulders in high school with rich kids from the more affluent Rockaway Peninsula oceanfront communities of Neponsit and Belle Harbor. Bernie appeared to have a preternatural ability to move in moneyed circles even in his youth.
    Money, and making it, was the gospel he had heard at home from his parents. Their indoctrination had taken hold. Bernie knew that to be a success he needed to move among the affluent.
    In that well-to-do Far Rockaway crowd, he became close friends with Cynthia Greenberger and her high school steady and future husband Michael Lieberbaum, an honor student in math. Greenberger’s wealthy family would later invest big money with Bernie when he started his company right out of college, and they would lose big money in his Ponzi scheme. At the same time, Lieberbaum’s father, who became incredibly wealthy virtually overnight as a stockbroker, would play a key—and very questionable—role in generating business for Bernie in his early days.
    At Far Rockaway High, Bernie was laying the groundwork—dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, as it were—for his future.
    One thing was for certain, though: He wasn’t an academic wizard.