Seeing Bernie Madoff sentenced to 150 years in jail didn't exactly bring closure. Not only is the guy going to eat three meals a day on the taxpayer's dime, we still don't know how he pulled off the biggest con in history. How do we know it was the largest swindle ever?
Seeing Bernie Madoff sentenced to 150 years in jail didn’t exactly bring closure. Not only is the guy going to eat three meals a day on the taxpayer’s dime, we still don’t know how he pulled off the biggest con in history.
How do we know it was the largest swindle ever? Because a new site, the Hall of Infamy, puts Madoff alongside the all-time greats. Religious leaders, CEOs, corporations—all of your favorites are finally in one place.
Hall of Fames are usually reserved for happy things like baseball greats and funny cat videos, but with peoples’ frustration at a fever pitch, it’s the perfect time to debut a Hall of Infamy. After all, as good as Bernie Madoff’s prison Twitter is, sometimes we just need to know more.
While Madoff tops the list for the largest haul at $65 billion, he only barely nudges out the $60 billion bamboozled by John Rigas, the patriarch of Adelphia Communications, once the sixth largest cable operator. Enron (remember them?) clocks in third with a measly $30 billion.
The site is also nice for remembering simpler times with simpler crimes, like the Great Diamond Hoax of 1871. Two miners struck gold when they tricked Tiffany’s into buying their fake diamonds. To seal the deal, these guys actually led a four-day long expedition to a field that they had littered with fake diamonds. Now, there’s a story that’s got all the ingredients for an exciting heist—jewels, men on horseback, and thieves with chutzpah. Better than today’s pen-and-paper versions.
These days, you’re bound to feel wronged and angry at some point during the news cycle, so it’s nice to have a web directory filled with people you’d like to tear apart using pitchforks (kind of like Facebook, but you can’t poke these people—yet). With Hall of Infamy, you can pick a different bad person to rage at every day of the week! It’s cathartic and fun, and you can learn how to avoid being conned in the process.
Next up, they should make a spin-off website that compiles all the bad people who steal headlines, like Jon & Kate. They may not take our money, but they sure as hell squander our time.