“I have to agree with Madoff in one respect: Greed is a two way street.”
Actually Madoff appealed to his victims desire for safety, by providing alightly above average but extremely reliable returns. That’s why he was so diabolical, and was able to scam many intelligent and sensible people.
I'm not sure I agree with that. For one thing, "intelligent and sensible people" should have known that safety and above-average returns are usually mutually exclusive. The reliability of those returns should have been a tip-off that the whole thing was a scam. Secondly, one of the key items I read about early in this case was a comment by a CPA who said that anyone who could read a financial report would have been tipped off to the scam right away.