What Did Ruth Know and When Did She Know It?

@JimOCampbell

IT’S WELL KNOWN THAT BERNARD Madoff, now serving a 150-year prison sentence for a nearly $65 billion Ponzi scheme, is one of the greatest swindlers of all time. It’s less well known that he also ran an honest and successful market-making business, that he was one of the fathers of the NASDAQ stock market and that he pioneered the practice of trading firms paying retail brokers for the right to execute their customers’ trades (Robinhood, for instance, the company in the middle of the run-up of GameStop and other stocks this winter, receives payments from trading firms for its customer order flow). And it’s also less well known that other people who have never been prosecuted made far more from Madoff’s crimes than he ever did and that authorities had evidence of his fraud for years before they