When Bernie Madoff was going peak Ponzi, he tantalized thousands of unwitting investors into believing they could get a return of about 10 percent a year, every year, if they were lucky enough to get him to take their money. That promise was good enough to attract $65 billion to his scheme—and good enough to earn Madoff a sentence of 150 years in a federal prison.
But promising 10 percent clearly wasn’t cool enough for Hollywood’s millennial Madoff, Zachary Joseph Horwitz. No, if he was going to pull in the under-35 set, the aspiring actor with the screen name “Zach Avery” knew that something sexier than a 10 percent bump on stocks would be needed to appeal to his millennial targets. So when the then 28-year-old unleashed his Ponzi scheme, in 2014, he promised investors returns of anywhere from 25 to 45 percent, often in just six months, by investing in movie-distribution deals. By the time it all fell apart, on April 6, 2021, he had bilked these investors—many of whom were his chums from Indiana University—out of around $227 million.
