Free Madoff with the Money by Jerry Oppenheimer

were putting a lot of money into landscaping, and we were able to convince them not to water their lawns by hand with a hose,” says Shelley Fogel. “I’d see a guy watering his lawn, and I’d stop by and start smacking my arms and smacking my legs like mosquitoes were biting me, and I’d show them their shoes were getting all muddy. We’d get them that way. We were getting all these young couples moving to the island from Brooklyn. We gave landscapers stickers with our name and number to hand out to their customers when they mowed lawns, and we’d give them 10 percent of the job.”
    In order to get cheap labor, he says, they recruited help in black neighborhoods. “They would think we were cops when we walked in,” he says. “We used to pay $1.50 an hour when we needed guys.”
    In the end, Heiberger, who became a successful home builder on Long Island, and Fogel, who went into gaming in Las Vegas, decided against a third partner, which would have reduced their profits. As a result, Bernie went off on his own, a venture he would continue through his college years on a much larger and better-financed scale, and use even more creative tactics to lure customers. However, his brother, Peter, when he was in high school and a student at Queens College, worked for Heiberger and Fogel for a few summers.
    â€œPeter was a good kid,” says Fogel. “He had more of a personality than Bernie, and was smarter. Bernie wasn’t that bright.”
    Heiberger had had little or no contact with Bernie after high school.
    In November 2008, however, his wife attended the 50th reunion of her Far Rockaway class of 1958, and ran into Ruth Alpern Madoff—who had been voted “Josie College” by her classmates a half-century earlier because of her preppy, peppy, popular persona. She was listed in the Dolphin yearbook as one of the “senior personalities.” Another classmate, Barbara Aronson Curreri, also ran into her at the reunion before “all the crap hit the fan,” as she put it, referring to Bernie’s arrest just weeks after his appearance at the Fort Lee, New Jersey, hotel where the reunion was held. “Ruth looked absolutely stunning,” Curreri observes. “She looked in high school exactly the way she looks now, very pretty.”
    Another member of the class, also a Laureltonian, says Ruth sat at a table at the reunion “with a group she’s friendly with because some of her friends from school invested with Bernie. Ruth was a smart girl, not a shrinking violet that follows blindly. Take it from there.”
    However, Bernie’s pal Elliott Olin considered Ruth to be “an air-head,” recalls Jay Portnoy, who developed a friendship of sorts with Ruth when the two were students at Queens College. He suggests that possibly “Elliott was a bit envious [because] of being displaced in Bernie’s attentions” by the petite, cute blonde who would become Mrs. Madoff in just a few years.
    Ruth had been far more popular and involved in extracurricular activities at Far Rockaway than had been Bernie, although her main yearbook photo has her looking rather glum compared to the other graduates, who are pictured smiling. Ruth had been on the staff of the school newspaper, was a member of the Forum Club, was secretary to one of the teachers, and was a representative of the G.O. Council, a link between the students and faculty that sponsored the Kick Off Hop and Barn Dance.
    Volunteers from the class of 1958 had turned out a two-inch-thick, colorful, sentimental, and nostalgic book for the reunion that the Heibergers had sitting on a coffee table. In early December 2008 they invited some friends over who were skimming through the book, which featured a color photo of Bernie and Ruth smiling at the camera and looking richly tanned in expensive, preppy sports outfits and chic sunglasses.
    Says Heiberger:
    When the wife looks at their