The Hollywood star Michelle Pfeiffer is set to play Ruth Madoff in a forthcoming HBO movie about one of the biggest financial frauds in history, according to Variety magazine.
In The Wizard of Lies, Pfeiffer will star opposite Robert De Niro, who plays Ruth’s husband Bernard Madoff, the notorious former Wall Street fraudster. He cheated investors out of an estimated $65 billion with a Ponzi scheme. The two actors played opposite each other in Luc Besson’s gangster comedy The Family.
The Madoff film is based on the 2012 book of the same name by The New York Times writer Diana Henriques, with additional source material from Laurie Sandell’s book Truth and Consequences.
It is one of two Madoff television projects under way. ABC is producing a mini-series called Madoff, starring Richard Dreyfuss and Blythe Danner.
Madoff, 77, is serving 150 years in jail. He was arrested in December 2008 after his sons Mark and Andrew told authorities that their father, a veteran New York financier, had confessed to them that his firm’s asset management scheme was “one big lie”.
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The film tells of the trail of destruction caused by Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.
The fraud was exposed as the global economy fell into crisis. Roughly $17.5 billion invested by pensioners, charities and other clients over decades was mostly gone, paid out as fake profits or raided by Madoff’s family and cronies.
This month a judge sentenced the last defendant in the case to six months in prison, marking the end of a prosecution that lasted more than six years. Irwin Lipkin, 77, was the Madoff firm’s controller from 1964 to 1998.
Lipkin pleaded guilty in 2012 but, like other defendants, said he was unaware Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme.
“Smarter people than myself were taken in by him,” Lipkin told the court.
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Sentences for the remaining 14 defendants have ranged from ten years for Madoff’s brother Peter and another top executive at the firm to no prison time for co-operators.
One defendant died before he could be sentenced.