Editor's note: The following article refers to spiritual concepts. Please read Lovefraud's statement on Spiritual Recovery. It's Christmas Eve and I am full of gratitude today. I witnessed evil first hand as my father, a sociopath, murdered at least four (4) people and destroyed countless lives. It almost doesn't make sense that I could be so happy and peaceful today, but it is a fact for me. I do not ask or need others to believe what I believe; I only share my personal experience. It is Faith that changed my life. I came to a place, a way of thinking, that was just too painful to live with so I made a decision to try something different. I prayed for help, for truth and …
What was Bernie Madoff thinking?
“It takes an extraordinarily heartless conman to swindle a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and Nobel Peace Prize winner out of all his charitable funds.” Wrote James Bone in the Times Online. “Yet that is exactly what Bernard “Bernie” Madoff is alleged to have done to Elie Wiesel, the author of the Holocaust classic Night and a friend from the Jewish community in south Florida. According to the Times Online article, "The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity now admits that it invested $15.2 million (£10.1 million) with Mr Madoff that represented “substantially all of the foundation's assets.” The charity of the Nobel laureate, in New York, will have to raise new funds if it is to main …
Unreasonable Requests from my Father, the Sociopath
I believed my father was a successful “investor” when I was growing up. At least that's what I told myself. He made a great deal of money, we lived in expensive homes and he always had plenty of cash. He spent money like water. But in my early twenties, suddenly things didn't look so good. We had started to have money problems. I came home from college because of money “to wait until his next deal came through”. That is when FBI agents began showing up at the house looking for Dad. My father was in trouble, but he kept telling us kids it would be alright. “The Feds were after him”, he said, but he would beat them, “they had the wrong guy.” That was his standard response when something w …
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Bernie Madoff: The accomplishment of an entrepreneur or a psychopath?
Last night was the final night of a course in social gerontology I taught at the University of Bridgeport. I left the class feeling optimistic about humans. While walking to my car I reflected on an interview of Dr. Charlotte Perry, Medical Anthropologist at UCSF. When asked about the needs of aging African Americans she said, “I did a study in the Southeastern part of the United States of a large group of widows living in subsidized housing. The widows who were "weller" (for lack of a better term) were in fact taking care of those in the housing complex that weren't as well. The housing complex management took no responsibility for making assessments on health status beyond the initial a …
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Something’s Not Right Here…
Have you experienced something that felt all wrong, but you couldn't quite put your finger on it so you dismissed it? It could be a small detail, but feels important, really important, and your mind is telling you that it just doesn't add up or make sense so the best thing to do is let it go. Whatever the conflict, our common sense is not able to reconcile the problem or rationalize what it means. Often times, the reason is, what we are seeing is so frightening that we don't want to know the truth. This was my experience with my father and it happened a lot. His behavior was raising flags, big ones that I can see now, but at the time, I didn't want to believe what I was seeing or …
Freedom from a Sociopath’s Destruction
I am not sure if I will continue to post each week. Many of the stories carry the same theme and I think most of you on this site know what a sociopath is capable of, how much destruction they leave in their path and how we all felt once we discovered the truth. For me, it's really about the road to recovery. The first and most helpful tool I was given was Martha Stout's book The Sociopath Next Door. It helped so much to see it in writing, the same behaviors, manipulation and the different types of sociopaths. Lovefraud provides the best resource I have found to date (thank you Donna). Then it was all about acceptance. I needed to accept that my father never loved me. That one took a …
A Trip to Death Row
I had visited my father on Death Row before, but this trip was different. I was traveling to Union Correctional Institution with two homicide detectives with the intent to record a conversation with my father about two murders he described to me years earlier. Actually the main purpose of this visit was to get him to tell me about another murder, one that he never confessed to me, but one that I know he committed. It was his first victim, but they still have not found the body. It was an old friend of my fathers that disappeared after meeting with my dad, but this is a story for another day. It is so hard to write about my father's activities simply because of the number of victims and …
Pennsylvania State Senator Vincent J. Fumo on trial for corruption
Daily newspaper accounts of two big trials currently underway in the Philadelphia area have put sociopaths on display for all to see, if only people knew what they were looking at. In the first trial, Pennsylvania State Senator Vincent J. Fumo, a Democrat who represents Philadelphia, is accused of 139 counts of conspiracy, fraud, obstruction of justice and filing false tax returns. The testimony emanating from the Philadelphia courtroom is far more colorful than those charges sound, and we'll get to that in a moment. In the second trial, taking place across the river in Camden, New Jersey, five young men, all foreign-born Muslims who grew up nearby Cherry Hill, are accused of plotting a …
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The psychopathic world of David Mamet’s plays
Hilton Als writes this in a recent New Yorker magazine: Among the many terrible realities to which David Mamet exposes us in his exceptional, calculated work, one theme stands out: suckers will never get a break in this wretched world. In the sixty-year-old playwright's fictional universe, the humane are too soft and dim-witted to survive; their tormentors chew them up with dry relish. Mamet treats the stage as a kind of bloody forum; the gladiators one finds there are skinny con artists, callow film producers, real-estate agents in cheap suits, and ghastly lovers who spar, using the author's hyper-stylized language as both spear and shield. Even to refer to some of Mamet's characters as …
Turning in My Father in 2004
My memory of the murders (Lost Memories of a Sociopathic Killer) my father committed came back to me on a Thursday. On Saturday morning I called information for retired homicide detective Dan Nazerchuk's home phone number. He was the lead investigator that helped convict my father of murder 17 years earlier. I was nervous about it but knew it was the right thing to do. My biggest fear was that news of this might get out and affect my family and career. I'm married with a beautiful daughter and heavily involved with the community and her school. I also own a small business and most people & associates around me knew nothing of my father. It is hard to explain the mixed emotions that …