‘He’s a financial serial killer’: how Bernie Madoff became the monster of Wall Street

Locked inside his office on the 22nd floor of a New York building, René-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet sliced his arms open and bled into a trash can to avoid making a mess for the cleaning lady.

“He chose the methodology of death that he did, a painful solution to atone for his sins of omission,” says Frank Casey, a financial investor who worked with Villehuchet. “What a waste of a man.”

The French investment fund manager had lost $1.5bn of his clients’ money to Bernie Madoff, the architect of the biggest Ponzi scheme in American history, who had surrendered to police 11 days earlier.

The story of Madoff’s rise and fall, and how his illusory gift for defying the gravity of financial markets shattered countless lives, is told in a four-part documentary released on Netflix on 4 January.

features whistleblowers, employees, investigators and victims as well as previously unseen video depositions of Madoff himself. One interviewee describes him as “a financial sociopath, a serial financial killer”. Another says he was a man of “pure evil”