DALLAS — On Wednesday night, ABC began airing a two-night miniseries called “Madoff." The man who inspired the program is well-known in Dallas.
After Bernie Madoff was arrested for orchestrating one of the largest financial scams in history, a Dallas firm called AlixPartners — with offices in Uptown — helped compile a list of Madoff investors who lost out.
The number of names grew to more than 13,000.
Among them was David Wallenstein of Dallas.
“The Madoff sales pitch and what they did was incredibly persuasive," he told us.
Though he said he never even met Madoff, Wallenstein acknowledges he was persuaded to invest millions with him for decades.
Wallenstein was made aware of Madoff when his father started investing with Madoff in the 1970s. Wallenstein acknowledges he had his doubts about the murky explanation of how Madoff produced returns with what seemed to be too-good-to-be-true consistency.
At one point, Wallenstein even hired a stock professional to meet with Madoff’s representative to review what was being done with all the money.
“He said, 'If it were a Ponzi scheme… there is no possibility of a Ponzi scheme lasting this long. It would fall over as it grew. This guy is legit,'” Wallenstein recalled.
Many other people thought the same thing until 2008, when a lot of investors tried to get their money... and it wasn’t there.
"I got a phone call from a cousin of mine who also had money with Madoff. And he asked, 'Have I read the papers?' And I said, 'No.' And he said, 'All that money you had is zero.' I actually didn’t believe him until I checked and said, 'Oh my God!”
Wallenstein said Madoff made off with millions of dollars of his. But he said it didn’t destroy him financially.
“It set me back quite a bit, but it didn’t change my lifestyle,” Wallenstein said.
He was happy to see Madoff get a whole new lifestyle when he was sentenced to 150 years in prison. But Wallenstein said his satisfaction with the sentence had nothing to do with vengeance.
“This guy is so morally bankrupt that it is necessary forever to keep this guy away from the public," he said.
Weinstein said what bothers him most is not the millions taken from him, but rather that so many charities and average people were similarly swindled.
"Stealing from me is horrible — morally and completely unacceptable — but there is a difference stealing from wealthy people who can afford it versus stealing and destroying the lives of people who can’t afford it, which he did to hundreds and hundreds of people," Wallenstein said.
As awful as the whole experience has been, Wallenstein said he planned to watch ABC's two-part drama.
“I’m just curious. I’m interested,” he said.
As the TV version unreels, the real life drama is still playing out... with a plot twist.
Like some other investors, Wallenstein had multiple Madoff accounts and withdrew more than he put into a couple of them. Many investors who benefited from those gains were sued to pay back that money back so it can be redistributed to other victims of the scheme.
Wallenstein sees the need for others to receive some of their money back, but he complains that the funds have been extracted this way. “So they screwed a second time Madoff victims, treating us as if we were part of a fraud," he said.
Wallenstein said more than seven years after he lost millions of dollars, last month he had to pay back millions more.
