Mark Madoff’s Name Became Too Big a Burden to Bear

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Last Friday, the publisher of a promising real estate newsletter called Sonar Report rose before dawn, scoured the news to gather items for that day’s edition and, at 9:04 a.m., sent it out to his e-mail subscribers.

Unknown to almost all of his subscribers, that publisher was Mark David Madoff, the older son of the convicted swindler Bernard L. Madoff.

Less than 24 hours after sending his e-mail, he hanged himself in his downtown Manhattan apartment, leaving behind a life of burdens and blessings.

The blessings appeared to be sustaining him, even on that final day, according to those closest to him. They recall a man who was patiently building a new business, talking regularly with close friends, spending time with his wife and four children and, even in the last hours of his life, walking his dog, an affectionate Labradoodle.

But behind that screen, the burdens of life as Bernie Madoff’s son — the continuing suspicion from the public, the harsh accusations in numerous lawsuits, and his exile from the world of Wall Street — were steadily becoming unsustainable.

“The pressure of the last two years weighed on him enormously,” said a person who had remained close to him since childhood. “He was deeply, deeply angry at what his father had done to him — to everybody. That anger just seemed to feed on itself.”

The burden had eased as the public’s fierce interest in the case seemed to fade, this person said. But the spate of lawsuits filed last week by the Madoff trustee included a troubling one against his children and “cases against a lot of smaller people, many of whom he knew, some of whom were relatives,” the person continued. “It reopened the wounds. It must have just been more than he could bear.”

Mark Madoff, 46, had also been named in at least nine lawsuits that sought to recover millions of dollars in damages and muddied his professional reputation, friends said. And he was troubled by news articles that repeatedly — and, according to his lawyers, falsely — portrayed him as being under criminal investigation for some role in his father’s epic crime.

Most frustrating of all, this person said, was the fact that neither he nor anyone who knew him could publicly defend him. “There were all these comments from the trustee about how he was an incompetent boob, and to have all the people who knew otherwise muzzled by their lawyers — it was very, very hard.”

No one in the financial world, the only world where he had ever worked, would publicly risk giving a job to a Madoff.

He understood how tainted his identity had become. His wife, Stephanie, had applied to the court this year to have her last name and that of her two children changed to “Morgan.”

The Madoff name appears nowhere on the corporate records for Sonar Report. Its address is a U.P.S. store near his home, where he stopped in regularly to collect the mail. He concealed his role as founder and editor of the newsletter from everyone except family and a few close friends.

At least eight of his faithful friends were willing to talk about his failed struggle to stay on course, but none wanted to be identified for this article out of respect for the family’s privacy or concern that they would become the next target of what one called “the crazies” who circle around everyone in the Madoff saga.

Shame at being a Madoff shook the foundation of Mark Madoff’s lifelong identity, a close friend said.

“He had always been so proud of his name and being the guy who was Bernie Madoff’s son,” the friend said. “And then afterwards all anyone ever saw in him was that he was Bernie Madoff’s son.”

The media attention, which only intensified after Mr. Madoff’s suicide, prompted his family to decide to cremate his body and not hold a funeral. A private memorial service was held at an undisclosed location on Thursday....(NY Times)