Madoff, With the Emphasis on the Off

Hadassah calls itself the Women's Zionist Organization.

And there's a new reason for that:

In New Book, Investor Tells of Affair With Madoff

The story outline:

Hadassah, the Jewish volunteer organization, knew it had invested $40 million with Bernard L. Madoff by the late 1990s. It also knew it had taken more than $130 million from its Madoff accounts and still had millions on the books when the vast Ponzi scheme was revealed in December.

What the charity says it did not know, however, was that Sheryl Weinstein, its chief financial officer when it made those investments, was having an affair with Mr. Madoff, The New York Times’s Diana B. Henriques and Stephanie Strom reported.

Ms. Weinstein, who has been married for 37 years, discloses that relationship in “Madoff’s Other Secret: Love, Money, Bernie, and Me,” a memoir scheduled for publication by St. Martin’s Press at the end of August, a spokesman for the publisher confirmed.

...Ruth Madoff, who has been married to Mr. Madoff for almost 50 years, knew nothing about the “alleged affair,” said Peter Chavkin, her lawyer.

...Ms. Weinstein’s relationship with Mr. Madoff “spanned 20 years.” That would take it back to 1988, when Hadassah received a gift of about $7 million from a French donor, whom the organization has declined to name.

That money was already invested with Mr. Madoff, and the donor wanted it to remain in his hands, the organization reported in December. Thereafter, Hadassah invested an additional $33 million with Mr. Madoff, who was a well-known figure on Wall Street and a contributor to several other prominent charities — some of which were also victims of his fraud.

...Despite Mr. Madoff’s remarkably consistent returns — an average of 11 percent a year from 2003 to 2008, according to Hadassah — the organization did not make any additional investments with him after 1997, the year Ms. Weinstein left the organization.

But Ms. Weinstein and her husband did. According to her previous statements, they invested virtually everything they owned with Mr. Madoff, and lost it all.