Free Madoff with the Money by Jerry Oppenheimer Page B

liberal activist.
    After registering, he immediately began pledging for a fraternity. It was called Sigma Alpha Mu, known as “Sammy,” and had only Jewish members.
    Curiously, while blacks were blocked from the campus, Jews—another group discriminated against in the South back then—were welcomed. Jewish friends of Bernie’s, such as Joe Kavanau, then starting at the Ivy League’s Columbia College in New York City, were surprised that he would go to school in the South “where they thought Jews had horns and tails.”
    But as far back as the 1920s the University of Alabama actually encouraged Jewish students to come on down, especially those from the Northeast where many colleges had quotas restricting Jewish enrollment.
    George Denny, a university president, had started the cheerleading for the Jewish recruitment—not because he was a flaming liberal, but mainly because the school was financially struggling during his tenure and he needed to fill the coffers with out-of-state tuition money.
    William Bradford Huie, the writer, who had attended the University of Alabama in the late 1920s during Denny’s tenure, wrote in his autobiographical novel Mud on the Stars that those early Jewish students brought a competitive and academic focus to the university. At the same time, those outsiders sparked clashes with the slow-paced, Old South school culture. As a result, the Jews from up North were not welcomed in the traditional fraternities, so they started their own.
    By the mid-1950s, when Bernie arrived, there were almost a thousand Jewish students attending Alabama; there were four Jewish fraternities like Sammy, and three Jewish sororities. Most of the members were from the New York City area.
    In any case, the Jewish question at Alabama, good or bad, wasn’t of concern to Bernie. He decided to matriculate there because he wanted to get away from home, the school had easy entrance requirements, he couldn’t get accepted elsewhere, and the tuition was especially low. Moreover, he is believed to have received either a swimming scholarship or a partial U.S. Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) scholarship, friends recall, with his pledge that he would stay in the cadet corps for all four years of college, and then serve his country on active duty.
    Along with joining Sammy, Bernie became a proud member of Alabama’s rifle-toting Crimson Tide Battalion.
    â€œBernie liked the spit-and-polish. He liked the uniform that had to be crisp and pressed. He even wore it sometimes when he wasn’t required to wear it. I guess it sated his obsession with neatness,” observes a classmate who had trained with Bernie on campus.
    The lineage of the Alabama Corps of Cadets began in 1860, and boasts of having produced half a dozen Alabama governors, hundreds of CEOs and presidents of major companies, a couple of dozen judges, a Congressional Medal of Honor winner, the founder of Habitat for Humanity, and the author of the book that was made into the film Forrest Gump , among others.
    Cadet Bernie Madoff was in good company.

    Like his classmates at Far Rockaway, his roommate in the Sammy House, Marty Schrager, from Long Island—another future Madoff investor—was unimpressed with him. The two roomed together not by choice but by chance—a drawing was held to team up the new pledges.
    â€œThere was nothing outstanding about Bernie, nothing that would lead anyone to believe that he was a genius or a financial whiz. There was nothing sinister about him. There was nothing about him whatsoever,” observes Schrager. “Bernie was just an ordinary guy from Queens. This was not a guy I would ever think could, or would, be involved with billions of dollars.”
    As roommates, Bernie and Schrager “studied together, hung out, went to parties, and pledged Sammy together. It was typical hazing,” he recalls. “We were forced to stay up all night, had to wear a