FRONTLINE: The Madoff Affair

Bernard L. Madoff and his colossal Ponzi scheme cost investors $65 billion and dominated the news for months, but few fully understood the inner workings, nor the magnitude, of this epic fraud. Veteran FRONTLINE correspondent Martin Smith went behind the headlines and, through exclusive interviews with those closest to the Madoff operation, made sense for us of a complicated deception that lasted longer, reached wider, and cut deeper than any business scandal in history. Smith looked at Madoff’s first years in business, starting in the early 1960s, his brushes with the SEC in the 1990s, and how the recent financial meltdown finally became Madoff’s undoing. For in-depth reporting that produced interviews no one else got, and for making sense of this monumental criminal enterprise, FRONTLINE: The Madoff Affair receives a Peabody Award.