Big-league business journalism touched down in the tiny town of Milford, Pennsylvania [pop: 1,200].
In a fireside chat on September 13th at the 10th annual Milford Readers and Writers Festival, financial journalist and novelist Richard C. Morais interviewed Forbes investigative reporter Richard Behar about his book on Bernie Madoff—the mastermind of history's biggest ($68 billion) and lengthiest (a half-century) financial fraud. Behar also spoke about some of the latest trends in AI fraud scams. (The event was captured in this illustration by award-winning cartoonist Bob Eckstein.)
It was one of five mainstage events at the Milford Theatre, including a fireside chat with Barron's editorial director Phil Roosevelt interviewing Matt Winkler—the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News. (Winkler is the co-author with Michael Bloomberg of "Bloomberg by Bloomberg" [John Wiley & Sons, 2001], as well as the author of "The Bloomberg Way: A Guide for Reporters and Editors" [2014]
Prior speakers at the festival include Alan Alda, M.K. Asante, Patricia Bosworth, Nelson DeMille, Gloria Steinem, Harvey Fierstein, Gordon Van Gelder, and many others:
Behar's first book "Madoff: The Final Word"—the culmination of 15 years of investigation—was published in 2024 by Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. (Behar exposed complicity and wrongdoing by Madoff's wife and sons, and established that the fraud dated to the early 1960s, when Madoff began his career on Wall Street.)
For speaking engagements, contact the Washington Speakers Bureau, the London Speaker Bureau, or Behar at richardbehar.com. Watch a sizzle reel here
Behar's relationship with Madoff began in 2011 with a simple email request from the inmate. By the time Madoff died in 2021, he had sent Behar more than three hundred emails and dozens of handwritten letters, participated in some fifty phone conversations, and sat for three in-person jailhouse interviews—a level of access provided to no other reporter. Behar also established relationships with hundreds of regulators, prosecutors, FBI agents, investors, Wall Street experts, ex-employees of Madoff's, family members, school classmates, and others. He also obtained more than 100 pages of confidential FBI documents. (During the Milford event, an excerpt of one of is conversations with Madoff on the subject of investor greed was played for the audience.)
Over a four-decade career, Richard Behar has garnered more than 20 major journalism awards. He is currently the Contributing Editor of Investigations for Forbes magazine, and an Associate Producer and narrator of an upcoming docuseries on post-Soviet organized crime. From 1982-2004, Behar worked on the staffs of Forbes, Time and Fortune magazines. He also did investigative assignments from 2001-2008 for the BBC, CNN, FoxNews.com and PBS. In 2005, Behar launched Project Klebnikov, a global media alliance committed to shedding light on the Moscow murder of his colleague and friend, Forbes editor Paul Klebnikov.
Richard C. Morais is an award-winning financial journalist and a New York Times bestselling novelist. His novel "The Hundred-Foot Journey" was made by Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey into a film starring Helen Mirren. Morais was also Forbes's European Bureau Chief and its longest serving foreign correspondent, and the editor who built Barron's Penta. Morais has won three Business Journalist of the Year Awards, while his fiction was a semifinalist or shortlisted for multiple literary awards in the U.S. and abroad. In 2015, Morais was named Citizen Diplomat of the Year "for promoting cross-cultural understanding in all of his literary work." He is a board member and the Editorial Director of the Milford literature festival.
Fireside chat photo: festival board member Linda Perlman Fields
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