Lappin: 'Justice has been served'

By Tom Dalton
Staff writer

June 30, 2009 06:00 am

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SALEM — Robert Lappin has had relatively little to say about Bernard Madoff, the Wall Street investment manager who was sentenced yesterday to 150 years in federal prison.

Lappin has declined most interviews, or commented only briefly on Madoff, who pleaded guilty earlier this year to engineering a $65 billion Ponzi scheme that wiped out hundreds of investors and institutions, including The Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation, the largest Jewish philanthropy in the region.

On one dark day in December, the foundation lost its $8 million endowment, employees lost all of their 401(k) retirement funds, and Lappin, a successful businessman, saw most of his personal wealth disappear.

"I'm not wiped out completely," he said. "It's just that most of my fortune is gone."

Lappin, in other words, had more reason than most to talk. And, yesterday, when asked about the court sentence, he did.

"My thought is justice has been served," the soft-spoken, 87-year-old owner of Shetland Park said during an interview in his office overlooking Pickering Wharf and the Salem waterfront.

"I think and I hope that Madoff will never see the light of day as a free person again," he said.

But Madoff wasn't really what he wanted to talk about yesterday. Six months after Lappin's world collapsed around him, a world he spent a lifetime constructing, the Swampscott resident has picked up most of the pieces and is moving forward.

"My energies have not been focused on Madoff," he said. "I'm not obsessed with hate or anything for him. I would have been disappointed if he had not received a sentence that kept him in jail the rest of his life. But our focus is getting our foundation back in business and getting our teenagers to Israel."

If anything, Lappin appears upbeat thinking about what lies ahead. There are several dates circled on his calendar.

"July 15 is going to be a big day for me," he said of plans to deposit money into the empty retirement accounts of employees at the foundation and at Shetland Park, the waterfront office park he has owned and operated for 50 years.

"Even more so than my foundation, this weighed on my conscience," he said. "I have people who have been with me for 20, 30 and 40 years, some of them retired, who are counting on that money, so I was conscience-bound to do it."

Another big day is July 12. On that Sunday, 83 high school sophomores and juniors from the North Shore will board a plane for Israel, the newest group to participate in the Lappin Foundation's "Youth to Israel" program, which began in 1971.

Back in December, when news of the Madoff scandal broke, that annual trip, a rite of passage for Jewish teens, seemed unlikely.

On Dec. 12, a Friday, the Lappin Foundation shut down. Programs were canceled. Employees were let go.

"I was shell-shocked," said Lappin, who heard the news while in Palm Beach, Fla., where he spends time in the winter and where Madoff also had a home.

Lappin flew back to Boston that weekend, conferring with Foundation Executive Director Deborah Coltin and others.

Before the end of January, they decided to go to the community for help, to at least try to get the popular "Y2I" trip off the ground. Coltin and many others, all volunteering their time, started making phone calls from the foundation's small headquarters on Congress Street.

"It was a crash course in fundraising," she said.

Soon, they hit it big.

"There was one anonymous donor that came forward" with $100,000, she said. "He said, 'We need to keep this going.'"

That gift sparked more giving until they had raised $450,000 from more than 300 donors. Donations ranged from $20,000 to dollar bills from the Hebrew school students at Temple Beth Shalom in Peabody.

"I remember it was a big white envelope with pictures," Coltin said.

The foundation has since raised additional money for other programs: Friday evening Shabbat services and dinners in families' homes; books for children on Jewish values and history; professional development for Jewish educators; and a course on Judaism for interfaith families.

Five of the foundation's seven staff members have returned, although most are part time.

The foundation, however, is not out of the woods, Lappin said. It recently launched a $500,000 fund drive for 2010 and needs community support to continue.

But it has come a long way since December and so has its namesake. When he replaces the lost 401(k) funds, Lappin said he will "feel I have accomplished everything I came back for."