How is the wife of the creator of the largest financial pyramid

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Every morning a petite blonde walks from her homely apartment to Upper Crust Bagel Company on Sound Beach Avenue, the main street in this picturesque village of Old Greenwich, New England, with a population of 6 600 people.

Almost everyone who lives here knows that Ruth Madoff is in exile, and they basically don’t touch her.

They know the basic story of her downfall - how her privileged world came crashing down in December 2008 after her husband Bernie confessed to the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. The fraud was estimated at $18 billion, for which he is serving a 150-year sentence in prison.

Ruth, in turn, lost everything: money, social status, a husband and two sons. The eldest son, Mark, committed suicide in the 2010 year, and Andrew died of cancer in the 2014 year.

Ruth turns 76 this week, two days before the release of HBO's Master of Lies, a dramatic retelling of the fall of the Madoff family. Starring Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer.

Although Ruth lives an hour by train from Manhattan, this world is far from the one to which Ruth once belonged, living in an apartment on the Upper East Side and relaxing in a mansion in Palm Beach and Montauk.

After the trial of her husband, Ruth was forced to abandon his luxurious place of residence. In addition, her friends from high society were no longer happy to see her. Donald Trump, who condemned Bernie and called him "a disgusting scoundrel without principles," refused to rent Ruth's apartment in any of his buildings in Manhattan, while the woman was desperately trying to find a place for later life.

Before the court in 2009, her husband, Bernie, made a deal with the prosecutor's office in exchange for refusing most of their benefits: valuable mansions, jewelry, cars and art objects for $ 80 million. Ruth was allowed to take $ 2,5 million.

After that, she lived in an exclusive condo in Boca Raton, Fla., And moved to Old Greenwich in 2012 to be close to her three grandchildren living nearby. For two years, she lived on 57 Thomas Avenue, in an old house built in 1905 and owned by her son Andrew and his ex-wife Deborah West, according to public records.

"She was a very good neighbor, that's all I can say," said Mike Worden, who lived across the street from Madoff's house.

Two months after Andrew’s son died from a rare form of lymphoma, Ruth moved out of his house. Two years later, the house was sold, and recently it was demolished to make room for building a new one.

Ruth moved to a townhouse in a condominium complex The Gableswhere he lives now. It is indicated that a one-bedroom room is rented for $ 3 100 per month.

It was here that Pfeiffer, who played Ruth in the movie Master of Lies, sat in the kitchen chatting with Ruth. “She sat in the kitchen and studied it,” the source said.

“I don't think it's appropriate to say that Ruth is collaborating with the film. Michelle just spent some time talking to Ruth. I don't think they spent much time on the script. They just met,” Levinson told the publication Page Six.

Neighbors said that Ruth is constantly walking.

She walks every morning to buy a bun in a certain bakery, but avoids other bakeries in the city. She is unsociable due to the fact that many people have lost their money because of Bernie.

Now her new friends are a group of women who attend church and don’t grow hair and nails, said a neighbor who saw Ruth.

"If they didn't live in Old Greenwich, you'd think these ladies were homeless," she said Post. — Ruth spends a lot of time with them. She always wears the same jeans."

Last Christmas, a friend helped Ruth sell church crafts at a local market, another neighbor said. “It was a spectacle to watch Ruth Madoff pull out crafts from under her desk and get paid for it,” he added.

Other neighbors saw her on her morning walk at a nearby beach on Long Island. She walked up and down the town's main street, stopped at Anna Banana's, a store that sells children's clothing, and also visited a beauty salon.

“Why can’t she just live in peace?” asked the woman, who left the salon to prevent the photographer from taking pictures. “She has the right to privacy.”

The friendly attitude of this beauty salon is very different from the Pierre Michel salon, which is in Manhattan, where Ruth went more than 10 years to the procedures.

The owners of Pierre Michelle banned Ruth from visiting the salon after Bernie’s arrest in 2008, and she remains an unwelcome guest to this day.

“Unfortunately, many of Pierre Michel’s clients have been victims of Bernie Madoff,” a salon spokesperson told the publication. The Post.

Instead of the $ 400 she paid for dyeing hair in Pierre Michelle, she now pays $ 175 to Old Greenwich.

Although Ruth was not charged with crimes, the family was avoided, mainly because many elite people invested in Bernie’s project and lost their savings. The Holocaust survivor of the Nobel Prize Eli Wiesel, who died last year, called Bernie a “scoundrel” and said that his charity lost $ 15,2 million due to Madoff and he lost all of his savings.

The sons of the spouses refused to speak with the mother after the arrest of the father. They claimed that they had never been in the scheme, but wondered why she continued to support her husband to live with him in their Manhattan penthouse 3 of the month when he was under house arrest between the years 2008 and 2009.

Ruth Alpern met Bernie Madoff when she was 16, and they were in high school in Queens. Both she and Bernie grew up in the Jewish quarter in Laurelton. They got married in November 1959, when she was 18.

Ruth, who had been married to Bernie for almost 60 for years, worked as an accountant for him when he set up his investment business in 1960. But she claimed that she did not know that her husband was creating a financial pyramid.

After her husband was accused of mass fraud, the couple tried to commit suicide on the night of January 1 2009.

“I don’t know whose idea it was, but we decided to kill ourselves because everything that happened was so terrible,” Ruth Madoff said in an interview with the program 60 Minutes channel CBS.

Ruth visited her husband in federal prison in North Carolina, but she had to stop it after her son Andrew presented an ultimatum: if she wants to communicate with Andrew and see her two granddaughters, she will have to forget about visiting Bernie in prison.

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