Part 3/11:

Born in 1938 in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Queens, New York, Madoff entered the finance industry in the early 1960s. His firm initially traded in penny stocks, but he quickly transitioned to developing groundbreaking computerized trading systems that would later be adopted by NASDAQ. By the early 1990s, Madoff’s firm was processing a significant chunk of the trading volume on the New York Stock Exchange and had established himself as an influential philanthropist who donated generously to charities and political campaigns.