PASADENA, Calif. — What kind of man would cheat thousands of people out of their hard-earned cash and smile while he was doing it? Bernie Madoff, the financier who pulled off the biggest Wall Street fraud in history, was that kind of man.

In 2009 Madoff confessed to orchestrating a multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme, and HBO will re-examine the drama when it presents “Madoff: The Wizard of Lies,” premiering May 20.

The show is based on Diana B. Henriques’ best-selling book and stars Robert DeNiro as Madoff and Michelle Pfeiffer as his unsuspecting wife, Ruth.

“What he did is beyond my comprehension,” says DeNiro. “So there’s a disconnect somehow in him, and I still would like to understand. I did as best I could, but I don’t understand … You can go so far. You can do your interpretation. The only things I do feel strongly about is that he didn’t tell his kids, and he didn’t tell his wife. But everyone around him probably had an idea. They just didn’t want to look too deeply because they knew something wasn’t quite right.”

Henriques, who was the first reporter to interview Madoff in jail, thinks he can be classified as a psychopath. “I don’t think you can conduct your life with such a lack of empathy for the devastation that you’re causing and not meet that fairly spongy definition of a psychopath,” she says.

“But I don’t think that tells us a lot about Bernie … You can put a label on a sociopath, but you can look at some of the greatest entrepreneurs and innovators in American business — I mean, Steve Jobs — some people would have said he’s a sociopath. It doesn’t explain anything to say he’s a sociopath. What you need to understand, and what I think you’ll see in Bob’s performance, is how plausible con men like this are, how utterly they can seize your trust and your imagination and make you believe,” she says.

“A friend of mine once said, ‘The thing about a Ponzi schemer is they can do a perfect impersonation of an honest man.’ And that’s what you’ll see,” she continues. “So I hope folks won’t get real tangled up in what kind of label, sociopaths, psychopaths, what kind of label you put on it. What it boils down to is how he treated people and how incredibly magnetic he was.”

DeNiro believes that a few of the upper echelon of investors harbored an inkling of what was going on. “I think some of them sort of suspected, but would never want to look. They were getting a certain amount of money in return. Why look too closely? It’s OK. That, I feel, is a certain kind of complicitness, but you can never prove (that) with some people.”

Henriques disagrees. “Because I think there’s a tendency to blame the victims of Ponzi schemes more than other kinds of fraud,” she says.

“But, in fact, I think you could make an argument that they are actually more to be pitied because all of us trust people in our lives, and only someone you can trust can truly betray you. So the stature Madoff had in the financial world, I can attest to. He was a source of mine for decades before he got arrested.

“The respect and the admiration that he had, the success he seemed to project, and the fact that his legitimate business firm was a huge success, technologically cutting-edge in everything. So you put all that together, and it isn’t crazy to trust Bernie Madoff. It wasn’t a leap of faith. It wasn’t an act of greed, by any means, to trust Bernie Madoff,” says Henriques.

“As I’ve often said, if you can’t inspire people’s trust and keep it through thick and thin, you need to go into another line of crime besides Ponzi schemes, because that’s a non-negotiable job requirement for that particular kind of fraud.”

The film is directed by Barry Levinson, who has worked with DeNiro on four other projects. DeNiro develops a role in a unique way, says Levinson. “We’ll go over stuff. We’ll be talking about things — this all in pre-production. And then he’ll be trying on some jacket, a thing, or et cetera. But step by step by step, very slowly — maybe inch by inch — all of a sudden this character begins to emerge. It’s not, like, one day. It’s somehow over that period of time of talking and pre-production notes and going over things, it just keeps evolving. And then there’s that day when all of a sudden there’s the character he’s going to play. I’ve worked with him now, and I’m fascinated every time to see that inch-by-inch transformation that takes place.”

What you need to understand, and what I think you’ll see in Bob’s performance, is how plausible con men like this are, how utterly they can seize your trust and your imagination and make you believe.”— Diana B. Henriques, author of “The Wizard of Lies”

TV spotlight

“Madoff: The Wizard of Lies”
May 20, HBO