The Miami Herald asks: why would anybody pay $675 for convicted swindler Bernie Madoff’s honorary diploma from Yeshiva University? The real question, exclaimed Rich Kroll, slapping his head after he got outbid for the diploma, is why anybody wouldn’t pay it.
“It’s history! It’s the big thing! It’s the biggest thing of the century!” said the anguished Kroll, a North Miami online retailer. “I should have bought it — I should have kept bidding. I dropped out at $600, because I only have $500 in my pocket, but I should have found a way! I wanted it!”
Kroll was just one of hundreds of people who lined up Saturday to buy goods confiscated from Madoff’s Palm Beach mansion, forking over their money almost as gleefully as the investors who put $65 billion into his Ponzi scheme before it collapsed in 2008.
The auction by the U.S. Marshals Service, conducted at the Miami Beach Convention Center, attracted about 150 buyers, with 6,000 more participating online. They paid more than $400,000 for everything from Madoff’s prescription eyeglasses to his underwear. The bidders were an eclectic mixture of awestruck high-finance groupies, intense art dealers and gimlet-eyed professional auction buyers, whose differing interests kept the bidding unpredictable and highly entertaining...
Fascinating. Find out more at http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/06/04/v-fullstory/2251664/to-the-bidders-go-bernie-madoffs.html
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