NEW YORK (CBS) ― from www.wcbstv.com – “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned?”
Try cheating one out of her life savings. Bernie Madoff is finding that to be true with the publication of an embarrassing tell-all by a woman claiming to be a former lover.
Right about now, the disgraced Ponzi schemer is probably glad he’s in Federal prison and away from the reach of the media, because the information coming out in Sheryl Weinstein’s new book has to be humiliating.
Madoff fleeced thousands of people out of billions of dollars. And at one time he was considered a giant in the financial world. But according to his on again off again lover, Weinstein, he was anything but a giant in the sack.
“This man was not well-endowed”, she writes, describing the first time Madoff seduced her in 1993.
Weinstein says her brief affair with the pint-sized Ponzi schemer early in the twenty years she knew him, with their first tryst taking place in a hotel near Madoff’s Upper East Side penthouse. No sex then, she writes, just kissing and cuddling.
The sex took place later in Washington. She writes she was stunned the man with the big bank account and big reputation was, well, so small. The next day, she says Madoff told her, “so now you know about me.”
She responded by saying she didn’t seem to have a problem, and writes that she enjoyed their times in bed.
Things started to go bad between Weinstein and the man now serving 150 years in prison when he said he was uncomfortable cheating on his wife, Ruth.
“He didn’t do well with pressure” Weinstein says.
Madoff and Weinstein broke off the affair but stayed friends for years, until she, like everyone else, discovered all the money she thought she’d made by investing with him was gone. Madoff’s crimes cost Weinstein and her husband their life savings and their Manhattan apartment.
Weinstein and her husband of 37 years, Ronald, are still married. She says they nicknamed Madoff “Winky Dink” because of his nervous habit of blinking whenever she was around.
Ruth Madoff says she did not know about the affair.