Family Jewels.(CIRCA, and the Madoff scandal)

Last week, with family vacations to St. Bart's and Aspen cancelled, the Upper East Side was swarming with kids. The McDonald's at Eighty-fifth and Third was packed--and, to most of the younger patrons, if not the sunken-eyed parents, an afternoon there was probably just as good as skiing. (The Web site destroydebt.com had posted a list of "20 Inexpensive Ways to Entertain Your Kids in the Winter." No. 15: "Count and roll the change.")

At The Breakers, in Palm Beach, the ten-thousand-dollar-a-week cabanas were all booked, but a guest there said the atmosphere was grim. "It's like everybody's in mourning," he said, referring both to Bernie Madoff's victims and to the people whose stock portfolios had merely taken a dive. "It's like a member of the family has died, and its name is Money." A new poolside pastime had emerged, in place of canasta: calling a friend over and showing him a stack of account statements from Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities--the now worthless things touting those steady ten- to fifteen-per-cent returns--and asking, "What did I miss?" The guest, having seen a few, thought he'd detected a clue (besides the impossible math): "When you get a statement from J. P. Morgan and Merrill Lynch, it's done on a laser printer. Madoff's statements were all done on nineteen-nineties printers--impact printers, typewriter-ribbon printers. If I was running a con, I would have kept my technology up to date is what I'm saying."

Back in midtown, business was brisk at the Madison Avenue headquarters of CIRCA, a jewelry-buying firm, where Madoff-related jewels had been incoming all month, like expensive shrapnel. "When Madoff hit, then we started to get the calls," the firm's C.E.O., Chris Del Gatto, said the other day in his office, which is decorated with polo paraphernalia. An older woman in Beverly Hills had mailed in a nine-carat diamond to sell, so that she could pay her expenses; the company had sent armored cars to retrieve two batches of family jewels from Chicago and Arizona. "If it's high enough value, one of the services we provide is we'll send Brinks," Del Gatto said.

He got on his speakerphone and called Tracy Sherman, the company's Palm Beach director, who talked about the daily rounds she'd been making to the homes of Madoff victims. "Just visualize a dining-room table with everything laid out in rows," ...