*pardon me whilst I spit horsefeathers*

What a load of tommy-rot! This is not only insulting to investors, but also downright infantilising. While the sort of con-artists who bilk lonely old ladies and vulnerable young trust-fund youths out of the occasional million might meet those criteria - needing someone they 'trusted' - a 'daddy-figure' - to manage their money, that is not the sort of person upon whom Madoff preyed.

If the beady-eyed investment-strategists at Stephen Spielberg's Foundation, and the hardened actuaries who managed the numerous other Foundations which Madoff robbed, were fooled, it wasn't because they wanted their Daddies!

My (educated) opinion is that Madoff used an entirely different lie, to win the blind trust of those he victimised.

The lie is 'Would a Jew cheat another Jew? We help each other!' There exists, within the Jewish-American community - particularly in New York - a subculture which is run entirely on the Honour System: the diamond trade. Built on this, there are segments of high-finance, and other commerce involving vast sums of money, which are scrupulously honest.

Nobody who tries to cheat, in the diamond business, ever works again, because his face is faxed to every diamond centre, worldwide, and is on the wall, in the foyer, where the unobtrusive security camera is comparing him to his picture.

Cantor-FitzGerald, Salomon Bros, and firms like that ran like families. When the CEO of Cantor-FitzGerald was at a dentist's appointment, on 11 Sept, 2001, and nobody survived, he promised to look after all his employees' families personally.

The problem with this, obviously, is it breeds both naivete, and can turn otherwise acute judges of mathematical anomalies into fodder, when a sociopath turns up in their midst.

(I am not talking about the Israeli Mob, who are the most-brutal, most-feared, worst perpetrators of organised crime in the USA. That's different.)

Bernie Madoff was smart. He was subtle. He was charming. He was running legitimate businesses. He was clearly, completely sociopathic. He didn't need to break the law. He did it for kicks and grins. It made him feel powerful, to fool other people - the better-trained, and more experienced, the bigger his sense of gratification.

People do not expect sociopathy. The truth is, functional sociopaths are fairly unusual. Most of them go too far, and show their natures, before they are thirty. One of the marks of sociopathy is usually a lack of impulse-control, and that is what tends to catch them out.

Bernie Madoff did not have that problem, or controlled it, brilliantly. (Sociopathy tends to occur at the extremes of the IQ bell-curve. He is definitely up with my dear ol' dad, as genius sociopaths go). Another mark is the need to keep doing whatever creates that sense of gratification: witness Madoff's efforts to send his money to relatives, to outsmart the law.

It is wholly unfair to blame the victims. As I said. people do not expect sociopaths - or the world would all be insane! (I spent decades studying them, to get over being the daughter of one.)

Madoff had decades to perfect his 'craft', which was to be the most trustworthy-appearing, most safe-seeming, most 'one of the Good Jews'-like fraud, that he probably almost believed it himself. The only times he would know it wasn't true, was when he needed a power-fix. Since he had impulse-control, he could wait, and let them come to him.

That he is Jewish, and bilked the Jewish community, is superficial. Had he been African-American, he would have used the African-American paths to power, and bilked African-Americans. He worked in the milieu which worked for him.

'Daddy substitute' my hat! He was such a genius, that if his own children had not turned him in, he would still be at his old tricks.

As for who owes what to whom, that is for the law to work out, if it can. I would say anyone who knew this was fraud, and profited from it, should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. However, I believe (because I was raised by a genius sociopath, and know what they are like) that only Madoff knew what he was doing, and even he managed not to think about it, most of the time.

There is only one way to keep a secret. That is to keep it. By telling his children, Madoff either was making a subconscious decision to be caught - borne out by his reaction when the police turned up. Or, he was testing them, to see if they would go along with his scheme. Probably a bit of both.

He fooled everybody. That makes victim-blaming/infantilising rather ridiculous, doesn't it?

There will always be sociopaths. Most of them are obviously not right. Every so often, one will turn up, who bewilders everybody. Sociopathy is a complex personality disorder, also called Anti-Social Personality Disorder. It is completely untreatable. The extreme cases are usually violent serial rape-torture-murderers, who don't get caught, until they have buried bodies in 36 States. Some of them are not violent. They're even less likely to be caught.

Nobody caught my father. He died a natural death - which was the only 'natural' thing about him. He wasn't violent, either. I may be one of the only people on Earth who understands what made him tick.

I haven't the first idea what caused Bernie Madoff's sociopathy, but it is very serious. He needs to be locked up, and the key thrown away. If he is paroled, even if he is 90, he will try again, and probably succeed!

I expect a painstaking prosecution process for Mr. Madoff. Profits made through this "evil" scheme MUST be returned. Madoff should be made by all legal means to disclose the whereabout of the funds and who his accomplices are – no matter how long it takes. Investors should get back ONLY their principals as there were no real transactions but shuffling of cash. Madoff is going down and his accomplices should go down with him. Period.

Madoff has shown that investor's trust and often greed can be "profitably" abused and exploited. Is this going to be the last? I doubt. But this is a call on regulatory agencies to keep a closer watch on investor managers/corporate institutions and how they invest investor's funds.

The auditor was surely part of the fraud, and after the Satyam affair in India, even the Big 5 seem unable to maintain professional audit standards.

The law must surely take its course, and the punishment should be heavy enough to discourage wanna be fraudsters from even trying.

Going forward, whatever we have taken for granted in the financial services industry – audit, ratings, due diligence, risk models etc. should all be re-examined.

Finally, there is no substitute for personal integrity and a sense of responsibility and respect towards enterprise owners and the public at large.

Of the few that did, they deserve their money. If they had the courage to withdraw money from something that had been making such a big profit, they deserve it. They walked away from what the greedy expected to be profits. If Madoff had been legitimate, nobody would have offered to pay them what they gave up, to walk away.