How did Bernie Madoff sleep at night? To this question there is no fathomable response. Where did Bernie sleep at night? Well, I know the answer to that one.

How could it possibly have taken me so long? The polished brass. The granite steps. The forest-green awning. The white 133. The traffic-chopper overview of the wrap-around terrace. How many times did I sit and stare dumbly at the television screen, like so many millions of others, before it finally came to me?

In another decade, in another life, that was my apartment.

There’s no other way to state it other than simply: From 1980 to 1982, my address was 133 East 64th Street. And when the elevator door glided shut, the top button took me home.

Like most of the world, I watched the Bernard Madoff saga unfold with giddy detachment in the closing weeks of 2008 and the opening ones of 2009. I had money in the market, and I had backpedaling investment people handling it for me. However they were pleased to report that my portfolio had no connection to Madoff. Thus I was free to gawk at the cut-and-pasted society matrons interviewed on the local news who had lost everything (except their need to be on television), secure in the knowledge that we had nothing in common.

Only when the media began camping outside the Ponzi schemer’s swank East Side building to update their perp-walk footage did the recollective waves begin washing over me. Was it...could it be...no...wait a second...oh my sweet Jesus.

Bernie Madoff and his victims will be forever connected. Some will recover and some won’t. None, however, can claim a connection as bizarrely intimate as mine. We shared an apartment, he and I.

I am a storyteller, both by nature and profession. I have occasionally been accused of over-editing when I work in print and over-embellishing the rest of the time. I will admit to neither. However, I cannot deny that this Madoff connection is a gift of the highest order. Having long ago forsaken the gritty vitality of New York for sylvan suburbia, I find myself in a constant, private struggle to maintain the perspective and self-importance that can only come with a Manhattan upbringing.

For many years my sordid tales of subway rides to school in the Bronx (I usually leave out the fact that the Bronx I knew was Riverdale), “cookie men” lurking in the shrubbery of in Central Park, and underage drinking at various adult watering holes were terrific conversation-starters and, occasionally, handy conversation-enders. They gave me a kind of street cred in a world of cul-de-sacs. But like certain body parts I have noticed lately, these connections to the city were beginning to age and wither.

Thanks to this one degree of separation, I now have new currency. Fifty billion in new currency, as a matter of fact. More, I’m guessing, than some of the countries I’ve written books about. The real beauty of my Madoff connection, I am finding, is that I can dust off all the old stories from my years at 133 East 64th which are suddenly riveting in the retelling. Not they weren’t good to begin with—believe me, you can’t live in a place like that at age 20, as I did, without seeing, hearing, and doing things that you will never see, hear or do again. But now these tales have acquired a richness of context that I never could have imagined.

Try beginning an anecdote with When I was living in Bernie Madoff’s penthouse apartment... and you can practically hear the necks crane and the eyes widen. It makes me think about the man who owned Mount Vernon before the Washingtons moved in. How much mileage did he get out of the opener When I was living in George Washington’s house...? The fact that our claims to fame require a little deck-reshuffling matters little. How many people can utter those words and mean them?

Let’s take this baby for a spin. I first made out with the woman who would become (and, astonishingly, remain) my wife