Any day now a 450-page report looking into how the Securities and Exchange Commission fumbled its multiple investigations of Bernie Madoff’s business is expected to be released. I can’t decide who was more incompetent: the investigators who took Bernie for his word when he told them in 2006 “Some people feel the market. Some people just understand how to analyze the numbers they’re looking at,” or the police officer who went to the Antioch home of Phillip Garrido to investigate a complaint of children living his backyard, and only talked to the accused kidnapper in his front yard.
It’s inexplicable how investigators and a police officer can be so derelict in their duties.
And it’s apparent that Garrido, a sex offender, has serious mental issues. Even his father has said as much, not that he was trying to use it as a defense for his son, who is accused of kidnapping Jaycee Dugard, holding her hostage for 18 years and fathering the girl’s two children. As for Madoff, there is no excuse for how he could wreck the lives of so many people and charities with his Ponzi scheme.
Two very different crimes but one thing is the same: both men are monsters.
