Madoff

Lyrics

Eighty-eighty-five Third Avenue.
They called it the Lipstick Building.
Pretty from the outside.

Bernie had the nineteenth floor.
Market-maker, chairman of the board.
A steady hand, a trusted name.
He'd smile and tell you, glad you came.
But the real work, the work that paid for the jet and the house in Palm Beach...
That happened two floors down.

The seventeenth floor had no windows.
Just Frank DiPascali, and the hum of the printers.
Spoofing trades from decades past.
Building a boat that couldn't last.
The statements looked so solid, so real.
Nobody saw the back of the wheel.
Just a red phone on a desk, for show.
A direct line to nowhere you could go.

And every quarter, the numbers were due.
The auditors would call, and what they knew was nothing.
And he'd just look out at the city below...
And tell the lie again, soft and low.
Sixty-five billion dollars of trust...
Turning to sixty-five billion dollars of dust.
And he just kept going.

A man named Markopolos sent a letter.
Said, "The math's not right, it could be better."
Sent it again in two thousand and five.
"The world's largest Ponzi, still alive."
But people felt lucky just to get in.
A velvet rope to hide the sin.
Charities, families, friends of a friend...
All riding on a story that had to end.

December tenth, two thousand and eight.
He sat his boys down, sealed their fate.
Mark and Andrew, in the Upper East Side air.
"It's all one big lie," he put it right there.
Not a market crash, not a bad bet.
Just a hole in the world, deeper than debt.

In the courtroom, he said he was sorry.
Said he knew it didn't help.
A hundred and fifty years to think about the shame.
While the wind blows past the seventeenth floor.
Empty now.