Bernie Madoff’s pyramid scheme spanned the globe — reaching from New York to Hollywood to London and Paris and beyond.

Many of Madoff’s European investors were ultra-rich.

Prince Michel of Yugoslavia travelled across the continent raising money for Madoff through René-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet’s Access Fund.

The royal families of Europe and even London’s House of Lords were infiltrated.

Lord Jacobs of Belgravia was bitten, losing part of his £128 million ($207.6 million) fortune.

Lady Victoria de Rothschild, a distant relative of Nathaniel Rothschild, the Atticus Capital hedge fund executive, was also on Madoff’s casualty list.

In America, however, Madoff’s investors were more diverse.

They were plumbers in upstate New York; retired prison guards in Arizona; movie stars like John Malkovich, Kevin Bacon and his wife, Kyra Sedgwick, Hollywood producers like Steven Spielberg and David Geffen; and mom-and-pop investors in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

In the weeks after Madoff’s arrest, once-merry Christmas and Hanukkah parties — from Greenwich, Connecticut, to Palm Beach, Florida — struck a sombre note.

“Anyone who was crowing about being in Madoff in 2007 was in hiding by 2008,” said one money manager.

Madoff’s scam cut a swath across all social classes and almost all the 50 states.

Some had invested through feeder funds, or through feeders into other feeder funds.

Others became directly invested through social connections with the Madoffs at their country clubs, via their family lawyers, their rabbis, even their priests.

Notably, one out of every six Madoff casualties hailed from Florida.

“It was like an atomic bomb went off,” said lawyer Richard Greenfield, who now represents many of Madoff’s victims in the especially hard-hit Palm Beach area.

Palm Beach is so rife with Madoff investors that, sitting at an upscale café on Royal Palm Way, the main thoroughfare on the island, Greenfield can literally point to them as they walk by.

Greenfield currently represents some once-wealthy Palm Beach widows whose husbands had put all or much of their retirement savings into Madoff’s firm, thinking their wives could live comfortably on the steady returns each year.

Madoff had followed the money to Florida.

His father-in-law, Sol Alpern, had retired to Florida and was still actively recruiting new investors for Bernie in the 1980s.

In addition, Madoff’s long-time patron Carl Shapiro and his family divided their time between homes in New England and Palm Beach.

Palm Beach is an extraordinarily insular wealthy community, which is still starkly divided between old-money WASPs and the nouveaux riches.

In Palm Beach, social segregation between Jews and non-Jews is talked about today as openly and offhandedly as if it were 1930s Berlin.

Despite token members of the opposite creed, the country clubs are divided by religion.

Jews frequent the Palm Beach Country Club, where Madoff and many of his investors and colleagues were members, while non-Jews tend to people the Everglades Club, Bath & Tennis, Beach Club, or others on the opposite side of town.

Entering the grounds of the Palm Beach Country Club, a cab driver nonchalantly tells a passenger, “This is where the Hebrews go, to their club.” She adds, “The Christians go to the other clubs,” waving at the opposite end of town. The divide feels not only accepted, but encouraged.

In the 1890s, Henry Flagler, a cofounder of Standard Oil along with John D. Rockefeller, built a railroad to open up Florida as a winter retreat for those who lived up north.

He also built two large hotels in Palm Beach, the Royal Poinciana and The Breakers.

According to the 1939 book, Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State, Flagler “was one of the first of a long line of retired millionaires who came to Florida to play and remained to work.”

Palm Beach wrestled with class warfare well into the late 20th century. Schools there didn’t integrate until 1971.

The Everglades Club was notorious for its policy of denying membership to blacks and Jews, who were not welcome as guests.

It was Donald Trump who finally broke the social divide in Palm Beach.

He opened a club that didn’t concern itself with religion or ethnicity — all you had to be was really, really rich.

“Trump was the first to open up a club in Palm Beach for everybody,” said Jose Lambiet, columnist for the Palm Beach Post.

Everybody, that is, who could afford to pay.

By 1999, Bernie and Peter had joined Trump’s new club, The Mar-a-Lago, and Madoff even once tried to get Trump to invest but was unsuccessful.

Predatory

Bernie Madoff began circulating more regularly in Palm Beach around 1996.

Carl Shapiro sponsored him as a member at the Palm Beach Country Club.

Madoff was also known to spend time at The Breakers, the historic hotel on the coast, as well as the Atlantic Golf Club.

In 1996 alone, Madoff spent roughly $40,000 in dues at those three clubs.

All told, Madoff spent roughly $950,000 on country club memberships between 1996 and 2008.

But the dues were a small price to pay for the business relationships Madoff formed through these clubs.

He used his connections there to solicit investors.

Ruth also played a part in recruiting clients for her husband, schmoozing at cocktail parties and social events.

Palm Beach Country Club has the aura of a retirement home mixed with the opulence of a Helmsley Hotel.

A golf caddy down on the greens named Andy said he often walked the course with Madoff — at the Palm Beach Country Club in winter and at the Atlantic Golf Club in the summertime.

Roughly a third of Palm Beach Country Club members were reportedly swindled out of a staggering $1 billion.

Michael D. Sullivan, another local accountant and a partner at S&P Investment Group, also drew investors in Florida to Madoff.

It’s not clear who convinced local Florida politicians to invest with Madoff’s fund.

The Democratic leader of the Florida House of Representatives, Franklin Sands, was one of the most high-profile public officials in that state to be a victim of Madoff’s scheme.

Even though Sands lived and worked in Florida, he was a successful Jewish businessman who had grown up poor in Brooklyn as the son of an immigrant and moved south, as many other of Madoff’s prey had done.

Sands had never even met Madoff, but about 20 years before the Ponzi scheme was revealed, Madoff’s fund was pitched to Sands as a no-risk investment with steady results and an exclusive membership club that limited acceptance of new investors.

In the end, Sands and his wife, Leslie, invested — and lost — their entire $3 million life savings.

In addition to his $33,000 yearly salary as a legislator, Sands now has a second job as a healthcare salesman.

Rick Stone, another Florida attorney and former Lehman Brothers lawyer, said he believes there was a country club mentality that also encouraged people to invest with Madoff and then to stay quiet when they became victims.

“I call it ‘financial incest,’ because he was dealing with an older crowd of people desirous of status,” he said. “Madoff earned you not only good returns but status. It’s like being a member of the Four Arts Club,” an exclusive library and sculpture garden in Palm Beach.

“There were only 120 members at the Palm Beach Country Club. It was a status thing to be associated with this crew. It was secretive and better somehow. Investing with [Madoff] meant, ‘You are average and I am not.’ And that is what Palm Beach is all about.”

Extracted from MADOFF: The Man Who Stole $65 Billion, by Erin Arvedlund, published by Viking. Copyright © Erin Arvedlund 2009. www.penguin.co.uk.