"Good news, bad news" probably doesn't begin to describe the day Hollywood screenwriter Eric Roth had last week.
Roth was nominated Thursday for a Golden Globe award as screenwriter of "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." And that same day, he learned that he lost all his retirement money to Bernard Madoff's alleged $50-billion Ponzi scheme.
FOR THE RECORD
Also, an article in Section A on Wednesday about the Madoff scandal misidentified the American Jewish Congress as the United Jewish Congress. The article also misspelled the last name of Reed Kathrein, an investor's attorney, as Kathrien.
"I'm the biggest sucker who ever walked the face of the Earth," Roth said Tuesday. "But the tragedy is the people who lost their life savings and their dreams."
Roth, whose screenwriting credits include "Forrest Gump," indicated that his losses were heavy, although he declined to give a dollar figure. He said he had entrusted his funds to an investment manager he had used for decades.
Although Roth declined to identify his financial advisor, the role of the many investment managers who steered money to Madoff's New York-based company will come under scrutiny in the months ahead as investors look to them to recoup their losses.
One such investment firm, Brighton Co. of Beverly Hills, was sued this week in federal court in Los Angeles. In the suit, Michael Chaleff of Arlington, Va., said he and other investors had lost about $250 million on investment partnerships that Brighton placed with Madoff.
The head of Brighton, according to the suit, is Stanley Chais of Beverly Hills, a philanthropist who had served on charitable boards with Madoff and who now describes himself as a victim of the money manager.
Reed Kathrien, an Oakland attorney who is representing Chaleff, said he would seek to have the suit certified as a class action on behalf of all the investors who entrusted their money to Chais (pronounced "Chase") and Madoff.
"A lot of them were in the entertainment business," Kathrien, with the firm of Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, said of the investors.
He said many of those investors were "niche" workers who weren't household names, but who lost small fortunes "because they'd been in [the investment funds] for 10 or 20 or 30 years."
The suit alleges that the Brighton firm was "aware of, or recklessly disregarded, the misuse and mismanagement of investment funds."
Chais could not be reached for comment Monday or Tuesday. But in its online edition, the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles quoted Chais saying he was also a victim and suffered large losses.
"Like everybody else who trusted and invested with Bernie Madoff, he betrayed my trust," Chais said.
