Madoff: The Final Word

Richard Behar has won more than 20 major journalism awards over a career spanning more than four decades. The late Jack Anderson, a founding father of modern investigative reporting, called him “one of the most dogged of our watchdogs.” Former Fortune managing editor Rik Kirkland described him as “the best writer of any investigative reporter I’ve ever worked with.”

His first book, “Madoff: The Final Word,” the culmination of 15 years of reporting on history’s largest fraud, was published in 2024 by Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. It uncovered the complicity and wrongdoing of family members and established that the $68 billion Ponzi scheme dated to the early 1960s, when Madoff began his Wall Street career.

(A summary of the book appears below.)

Career

Behar was born in Manhattan and raised in foster care on Long Island. He is a graduate of New York University, where he served on an advisory committee for its business journalism master’s program.

From 1982 to 2004, he worked on the staffs of Forbes, Time and Fortune. His investigations in those years included the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, for a Time cover story, and the Bre-X gold-mining hoax, for Fortune. From 2001 to 2008, he did assignments for the BBC, CNN, FoxNews.com and PBS. In 2005, he launched Project Klebnikov, a global media alliance formed to shed light on the Moscow murder of his friend, Forbes editor Paul Klebnikov. (Founding members of “Project K” include Bloomberg, The Economist, Forbes and Vanity Fair.)

In 2011, he returned to Forbes as Contributing Editor, Investigations. Since then, he has published investigations on subjects ranging from World Bank corruption to China-sponsored cyber espionage; from the Madoff fraud to the Klebnikov murder case; from Hess Oil’s ties to a Russian mob to President Donald Trump’s former business dealings with a mob-connected felon.

His Forbes reporting also covers business ventures between Israelis and Palestinians, a subject that gets little coverage. A 2013 cover story, “Peace Through Profits?,” reported from Ramallah, explored under-the-radar high-tech joint ventures between the two, and “Unlikely Partners” (2026) profiled more of them, including ventures between Jewish and Arab Israelis.

He is also an associate producer and one of the narrators of a documentary series, begun in 2019 by a team of reporters and experts, on organized crime in the former Soviet Union. The series is in the process of being completed.

Awards and Honors

Behar’s travels have taken him to more than 40 countries, including across sub-Saharan Africa, where he produced a 24-page special report for Fast Company entitled “China Storms Africa.” (The article won George Polk and Overseas Press Club awards.)

His honors include the Gerald Loeb, Polk (twice), National Magazine, Overseas Press Club (twice), Jack Anderson (twice), Daniel Pearl and Worth Bingham Prize, among others—on subjects ranging from terror financing in Karachi to corporate wrongdoing on Wall Street to the Russian mob in Siberia. His work in the 1980s on corruption inside the IRS sparked a congressional hearing that led to reforms, and he was praised by Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau for his award-winning articles on organized crime in New York City’s garbage trade.

Behar was named one of the top 100 business journalists of the 20th century by TJFR Business News Reporter. The American Society of Journalists and Authors gave him its rarely bestowed Conscience-in-Media Award for a Time cover story on the Church of Scientology, citing his “singular commitment to the highest principles of journalism at notable personal cost.” The church’s $416 million libel suit against him and Time Warner was dismissed. Over his career, he has been sued for libel six times and has never lost in court.

In 2001, he was named “Business Journalist of the Year” by the Corporation of London (the city’s governing body) for two Fortune articles: a cover story about counterfeiting in China and an investigation of the Russian aluminum empire of the billionaire Reuben brothers.

In 2002, as part of the CNN Investigation Team, Behar received a first-place National Headliner Award for “outstanding continuing coverage of attacks on America and their aftermath.” In “The Karachi Connection,” reported from Pakistan, he exposed a logistics leader of the 9/11 attacks. He is the only known journalist to have read the classified “Phoenix Memo,” an FBI agent’s July 2001 warning to headquarters that Osama bin Laden supporters were enrolling in flight-training schools across the U.S.

Israel and the Media

For more than a decade, Behar has been among the few mainstream investigative reporters to go after major media outlets, and often their reporters by name, for anti-Israel bias and falsehoods. His Forbes article “The Media Intifada: Bad Math, Ugly Truths about New York Times in Israel-Hamas War” documented how leading Western outlets spread inaccurate civilian casualty figures during the 2014 war.

A New York Observer cover story he co-wrote, reprinted in Hebrew in Ma’ariv, showed how the Associated Press botched an “exclusive” investigation it billed as “the most painstaking attempt to date” to determine who was killed in airstrikes on Gaza homes. The Observer story found that the AP had relied on posed photos, intentional miscategorizations and cherry-picked quotes.

With Maer Roshan, a longtime magazine editor and media entrepreneur, he ran Mideast Dig: Dispatches from the Media Wasteland (2016–2018), a nonprofit investigative outlet focused on journalism standards in Middle East coverage. In Forbes and at Mideast Dig, he exposed three reporters covering Israel and Gaza for The New York Times and the AP as having histories of open hostility toward Israel and Israelis.

Public-Records Cases

Behar has gone to court four times to obtain public records. Most recently, in 2026, he sued New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani in state Supreme Court for records he requested under the Freedom of Information Law.

The requests cover the mayor’s decision to rescind the city’s adoption of the definition of antisemitism used by the U.S. government and endorsed by most states, including New York; his revocation of an order barring city agencies from boycotting and divesting from Israel; and the removal of city webpages promoting New York’s business ties to Israeli entrepreneurs. The suit documents a “pattern of obstruction” by the mayor’s office. The case is pending.

In an earlier case, he sued the Department of Homeland Security in 2017, seeking Secret Service records of visitors to Trump and ten of his family members and aides during the 2016 campaign and transition. A federal judge ordered the records disclosed, an appeals court reversed, and in 2023 the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

The other two cases involved Felix Sater, a Russian-born former business associate of Trump who was convicted in a mob-linked stock fraud. Behar went to the federal appeals court in New York to unseal records from Sater’s criminal case, and to an Arizona court to unseal a lawsuit over a planned Trump project in Phoenix.