The award-winning screenwriter of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “Forrest Gump” is suing his Beverly Hills investment manager for losing all his money in Bernard Madoff’s scam.
Eric Roth, 65, discovered last week that his retirement nest egg had vanished – the same day he learned he was nominated for a Golden Globe award for “Button.”
“I’m the biggest sucker that ever walked the face of the Earth,” he told the Los Angeles Times.
The New York-born Roth filed suit in Los Angeles County Superior Court against his “trusted investment manager,” Stanley Chais.
The suit charges that Chais collected “enormous fees” for managing hundreds of millions of dollars for his clients but “simply handed over the entirety of these funds” to Madoff’s investment firm.
The screenwriter, who won an Oscar for 1994’s “Forrest Gump,” said Chais had a responsibility to diversify his hard-earned money and spot the warning signs of the imploding scam.
Chais, who is being sued by others for losing $250 million in the Madoff swindle, has said he lost a lot of his own money, too.
“Like everybody else who trusted and invested with Bernie Madoff, he betrayed my trust,” he told the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles.
Roth did not disclose how much of his money had vanished and how much he was seeking in damages. But he said he suffered “massive losses” and had relied on his investment manager for decades.
Meanwhile, the French financier who killed himself after losing more than $1 billion of his clients’ investments to Madoff also lost tens of millions of his own family’s money, his older brother said yesterday.
Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet “invested his own fortune” and ended up losing 20 percent of it, according to his brother Bertrand.
“He trusted Madoff completely,” said Bertrand, who said he was also a victim of the scheme.
Rene-Thierry began investing with Madoff three or four years ago, his brother said. His fund was one of the biggest losers in the scam – dropping an estimated $1.4 billion.
When Madoff’s suspected Ponzi scheme unraveled after his arrest on Dec. 11, Villehuchet and his business partner Patrick Littaye were “totally ruined,” his brother said.
“At first, he thought he’d be able to get the money back. He was very determined. Gradually he realized he wouldn’t be able to,” Bertrand told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from his home on Paris’ chic Place des Vosges.
Rene-Thierry, 65, was found dead at his desk in the Madison Avenue office of Access International Advisors on Tuesday. His wrists were slashed and a bottle of sleeping pills lay nearby.
Police labeled Rene-Thierry’s death a suicide, and the Medical Examiner’s Office is awaiting toxicology reports to determine the precise cause of death.
His brother denied reports that Rene-Thierry was a lavish, free spender.
“A lot is being said about him, like that he flew in by helicopter to his chateau – that’s not true,” Bertrand said.
“My brother was a man of simple tastes,” he added. “He was a very modest man.
Bertrand, who said he spoke with his brother almost every day, also disputed claims that Madoff’s victims should have suspected something was wrong much earlier because the returns on investment were too good to be true.
“Over four years, my gain was 17 percent – that’s not crazy,” he said.
Rene-Thierry managed a multibillion-dollar fund for European investors and reportedly put three-quarters of the money in Madoff’s hands.
Bertrand said he would be joining class-action lawsuits against Madoff and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Madoff is free on bail of $10 million while he is being investigated by federal prosecutors, the FBI and the SEC. He is the only person charged so far in the estimated $50 billion swindle.
His brother, Peter, and sons, Mark and Andrew, have said they know nothing about illegal activities. But The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that authorities are conducting a probe into whether family members helped Madoff carry out the scam for so long.