Stormy weather in New York

Central Park scene. Saturday at 4:00 PM. Photo:JH.

12/22. A weekend of weather in New York. Snow promised and delivered on Friday afternoon and more on Saturday, Then came rain, and snow gone by Sunday night except for the detritus, the corners, the curbside that weren’t pools of slush; the tops of cars parked for the last few days on the street. It’s officially winter.

The autumn season in New York is over. That’s for sure. Now comes the Big Freeze. This week coming up, with Christmas Eve falling in the middle of the work week, will slow everything down to almost a standstill. Except those of us who are preparing for the frenetic and maybe peaceful holiday with our friends and families, many traveling, many having begun their two-week holiday last Friday. I don’t know how the stores are doing because I haven’t been there but the restaurants like my haunts – Swifty’s, Michael’s, Le Cirque – are packed to the rafters.


	Splash News.

And they are all talking about the Grand Swindle of Bernie Madoff. This is a story that won’t go away any time soon because it involves so many many individuals, many of whom had some kind of now tragic participation in the Great Financial Catastrophe of 2008. Or, at least One of the Great Financial Catastrophes of 2008.

Saturday afternoon I went over to Zabars to buy myself a new coffee maker and toaster with a Gift Certificate that a very good friend of mine gave me for Christmas. The Zabars Gift Certificate is the Ideal Gift for a lot of us. As they say, they “never run out of sizes.” And the price is right there; it’s amazing.

Returning to the East Side with my bounty, I stood on the east corner of 80th and Broadway where I hailed a cab coming up the road. On this same roadway, in this cab’s path was a young woman standing almost in the middle of the (curbside) lane. She was talking on her cell and obviously waiting for the light to change so that she could cross. As the cab drew closer to her, he could see she had no intention of moving back to the sidewalk – out of the way -- where she would have been safer, and where he would have been able avoid the possibility of hitting her. However. She just stood there, duh, basically in the middle of the road, phone to her ear and oblivion all around.

So the cabdriver slowed down to a stop and carefully drove around her, taking a right into 80th, narrowing missing the girl on her cell.

When I got into the cab, I asked him what he thought of that. “oh, they do it all the time, all day long. You can’t let it get to you otherwise you’ll take it home with you.”

I don’t know about the rest of the world, but right now New York is a place where people are no longer in the life-saving habit of looking both ways and getting out of the way not only of oncoming traffic, but other pedestrians on the sidewalks or the staircases. The risk has been spread so thinly, to use the lingo of those Wall Street derivatives salesmen, that it apparently doesn’t even exist in a lot of people’s minds. It’s becoming more and more of a free-for-all.


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To me, the traffic behavior, both foot and automotive, is just another symptom of the state of our consciousness. To me, that can explain how a lot of people have got into a lot of trouble in managing a basic aspect of human community. I know that it sounds simplistic but it is all about behavior. And not in our favor, it would seem.

A friend sent me a document over the weekend written by a man who had been investigating the Bernie Madoff case for the SEC and wrote his final report in 2005. He was frustrated by the time he wrote it because he couldn’t get the Powers That Be to LOOK into it. Just like a lot of those people on the streets these days, they LOOKED AWAY.

How does this happen? It happens when people don’t want to know, or when they are too lazy to care or have a vested interest in the status quo. How does this get solved? Do I know?

We got an email from a reader in Houston on Saturday:

DPC,

Based on your writings it seems that New Yorkers are feeling about Bernie Madoff the way Houstonians felt about Ken Lay.

In the wake of the oil depressed 1980s, Ken Lay of Enron was the golden child of the social class in Houston. He and Linda sat on boards, chaired events, cut ribbons and generally restored our self confidence.

So when Enron collapsed; and while it was horrific for those who had toiled for years and assumed they were secure for life, it was also difficult to witness an icon prove to be a sham. It echoed of the 80's era when it was commonplace to find that your honest, hardworking, neighbor had given his house back to the bank.

I gather that the betrayal by Mr. Madoff has much the same impact on NYC as we felt with Ken Lay. And when the dust settled non-profits had to discreetly get the brass plaques off the walls.

It did not hurt that Mr. Lay passed away suddenly. The case was dropped and the widow Lay never missed an Amex payment. Loads of speculation ...


	Monica and Walter Noel.

In this morning’s New York Times, Alex Berenson and Eric Konigsberg have a story on the Fairfield Sentry Fund which had all or most of its funds in Madoff’s investment fund. The Fairfield/Greenwich Group, as the funds are known, is said to have had an exposure to the Madoff investment fund of more than $7 billion. Now gone. According to the Times, the Group was pulling in hundreds of millions a year in fees charged for “managing” the funds that were all with Madoff.

The head of this fund group is a man named Walter Noel who with his wife Monica have a high profile social presence in New York. They also have five beautiful daughters all of whom have husbands who work for Dad. Monica Noel is from a Brazilian family and her beautiful daughters have a style that is vaguely and also alluringly Latin-American. They are not only beauties but there is a lot of personality there.

The Noels’ social profile has risen noticeably in the last several years and especially in the last few, but their connections go back for decades when Mr. Noel worked in investment banking in Europe, especially in Switzerland where he obviously forged many connections that were mutually beneficial (albeit not infinitely) later on in life.

They have several residences, all impressively articulating their wealth, as well as welcoming. They bought a big house in Southampton on Lake Agawam a few years ago, one of the great houses of the town, built more than a century ago and designed by the legendary Stanford White. There, their summer soirees and dinners were lively -- fun and filled with the sunkissed faces and lots of laughter, as well as the beautiful daughters and their beautiful friends. The Noels added fresh energy to the town steeped in the torpor of giddy excess. They were, as Cole Porter wrote it, “ridin’ high.”

The Noels with the McCloys.

Monica with daughter Marisa (left).

Monica and Walter Noel are still out and about during this holiday season. However, the Madoff Catastrophe has cast a pall over everything and it surely has touched their lives. This isn’t, however, a loss of confidence. This is a matter where confidence is lost.

Last night after dinner at Swifty’s, I was standing on the corner of 72nd Street and Park Avenue saying goodnight to my dinner date when a couple she knew walked by in their warm winter woolies, moving quickly as if heading home to out of the cold. The man of the couple had lost a great deal of his fortune with Madoff. We just happened to know.

We commented to each other on how many around us have been hit by this. Some have been wiped out. Others sustained great losses. It is often reasoned that if one has great wealth, these losses won’t affect them. It may not affect their lifestyle, but it will strike fear that may never leave.

A view of the Mar-a-lago Club from the back.

Down in Palm Beach last week there was that to-do at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago where Bob Jaffe, the man who promoted Madoff’s funds among his friends down there, was at a party with his wife. An enraged guest, now a ruined Madoff client, verbally accosted Mr. Jaffe’s wife loudly calling her a nasty name referring to the female anatomy. There was also a Jack Nicholson-style 9-iron somehow involved in the blow-up. These men were friends only moments ago, members of a large group of people who were friends. Now they are all victims. Or enemies. Or both.

People ask how do these people feel about this Bernie Madoff? For those who were closest to Bernie Madoff, who were participating financially as well as those who enjoyed their friendship with him, this is perhaps the greatest betrayal of their lives. Betrayal is a wound that often never heals, for better or for worse. It can inspire destructive, even lethal reactions. Calling all gratitude ...!

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