New Book Depicts Madoffs' Scary Dysfunction

A new book about Bernie Madoff's family is hitting bookstores tomorrow and depicting a miserable, greedy, vain clan of epic proportions. Here are highlights from the New York Post's rundown of Truth and Consequences, by Laurie Sandell with cooperation from Ruth Madoff and her son Andrew:

• Bernie. A neat freak who dominated Ruth, he fooled around on her for 16 years and sexually harassed the wives and girlfriends of both his sons. With one sitting close enough to hear, he complimented her body but remarked that "she could have been heavier on top."

• Ruth. She pitted her sons against each other, turned regularly to Botox, and still refuses to divorce Bernie even though he crushed her self-esteem. “I always felt like I was going to be fired," she says of their marriage. She was more unsettled by his affair than her son Mark's death or her husband's Ponzi scheme: "It makes me sick to think about it," she says.
• Andrew. Mere months after his brother Mark hanged himself, Andrew called him a "mama's boy" who "ratted him out" as a kid, did poorly at math, and profoundly feared their father.
• Mark. Apparently fearful, Mark ignored it when his pregnant wife received a compliment on her rear end from Bernie. Later he hanged himself with the family dog's leash. “The prospect of a second divorce was unthinkable,” Andrew says about him. "He didn’t want to be a two-time failure.”

Click here to read more about "the most disliked family since the Mansons." (More Andrew Madoff stories.)