NEW YORK (AP) — Everyone’s mad at Irving Picard.
To be fair, his job is thankless: He’s the court-appointed bloodhound in charge of hunting down money for the victims of Bernard Madoff, a man who was so skilled at hiding money that he kept the biggest scam in the history of American finance going for at least two decades.
Wall Street hates him. Picard has sued more than a dozen banks, including several whose big link to the Ponzi scheme was one step removed — helping people bet on funds that bet on the fund run by Madoff.
Fans of the New York Mets, which have enough problems on the field, are angry at him for suing the team’s owners for $1 billion, just when they’re trying to find new owners and are still reeling from their own Madoff-related losses.
And most bizarrely, some of the people Madoff ripped off say Picard has screwy ideas about the law and is making them victims all over again by demanding they hand back “fictitious profits” that many have already spent.
A little more than two years into the job, the 69-year-old Picard, who was plucked from obscurity to recover the money, has become America’s most unlikely celebrity
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