Ira Sorkin, Bernie Madoff's miracle-making attorney--he has kept Bernie out of jail since December 11--is now asking the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to allow another of his clients, none other than Bernie's Missus, to retain the $45 million in municipal bonds she holds with Cohmad Securities, an entity owned in part by Bernie, with offices surprise, surprise, in the Lipstick Building, as well as the cash vested in her $17 million Wachovia account.
Sorkin has not informed the court as to how Ruth could have accumulated her $62 million cache--a tidy sum that does not include the Madoff's East 64th Street duplex, valued for the purposes of Bernie's bail at $7 million and held in her name.
Let us recall that in November and December Ruth made withdrawals totaling $15.5 million from her Cohmad account, the last being $10 million just before her husband's arrest.
Should the court grant Sorkin's request, Ruth will be sitting on a $69 million fortune--not bad for a kid from Queens who, apart from sharing in Bernie's ill-gotten gains, is not known to have amassed any real money save for her advance for co-authoring a cookbook.
Given that book adances for relatively unknown cookbook writers were relatively modest even before the publishing industry tanked, Chef Ruth would have had to have come up with a real spicy meatball of a tome to have earned those millions.
Is it possible, even in this jaded, troubled society that Ruth will be allowed to keep her fortune--garnered, obviously, via Bernie's criminal enterprise--as some of his victims struggle to pay for the bare necessities of life?
Justice may be blind. But it can't be that uncaring.
So why doesn't Judge Louis Stanton just tear up Sorkin's brief and run him out of his courtrrom for having had the chutzpah to make such a motion?