Everyone was dumbfounded.His legitimate business had flourished for 36 years,skilfully built up from trading over-the-counter penny stocks to a firm with 200 employees and a glassy Midtown office.He did not need the money. At his trial in 2009 he called his giant fraud a “problem”, something out of his control.But that hardly squared with a scam he had been conducting, in its tiniest details, since the 1960s.And the scam itself did not fit with the Bernie his employees thought they knew, treating them in his quiet, fussy way like family;or whom his wife Ruth thought she knew, after 50 years;or with the industrious, outgoing student who had worked his way through college by installing lawn-sprinklers on the side;or that affable guy at the country club who would softly suggest, over supper, that his closed fund might have room for just one more.Not being a man of many words, he said little to explain himself after his arrest.His talk of “torment” and “horrible guilt” was given short shrift by the judge, who sentenced him to the maximum possible, 150 years.His sorrow, the judge thought, was mostly for the more than $170bn in assets that were forfeited by court order:
