Bernie Madoff hated e-mail. He rarely used it at his high-tech Wall Street trading firm. When others did, he fretted about the trail it left behind. He wasn’t crazy about letters, either. A staffer had standing orders to destroy his correspondence with one important client. Even after December 2008, when the world learned that Madoff had run the largest Ponzi scheme in history, few personal letters surfaced. He always preferred to deal with people face-to-face. In September 2010, in the first months of this intensifying isolation, Bernie Madoff became my pen pal–forced by captivity to rely almost entirely on e-mail and letters to carry out his last, desperate mission. Read more in Forbes here.