Inside the Manhattan apartment of Catherine Hooper and Andrew Madoff, there is a spare bedroom containing items one might need in case disaster strikes. Titanium flashlights, solar battery chargers, and duct tape line one shelf. Pocket-size radiation detectors, potassium iodide tablets, and energy bars fill another. On a bed are anti-radiation suits. "We do not put these on our website," Hooper says as she unfolds a child-size suit with battery pack and air pump. The notion of a child coated with radioactive dust is too harrowing even for the doom-fearing customers of Black Umbrella, Hooper's emergency-preparedness company. She and Madoff are building the business off of "a fundamental awareness of how vulnerable we are," she says.
Yes, the resonance here is jolting, given the direction of Hooper's life. She was just another well-bred, social-climbing New Yorker with a good gig in the fashion industry when she moved in with her boyfriend, Andrew Madoff, in December 2008. That was three days before Bernie Madoff was arrested for operating the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. Hooper stayed around for the ensuing drama: When her intended father-in-law pleaded guilty and went to prison for life, she consoled Andrew, her fiancé. When Andrew's older brother, Mark -- his only sibling and his partner in the trading arm of their father's firm -- committed suicide exactly two years after Bernie's arrest, Hooper helped Andrew hone his own survival skills. "Resilient people are those who have a plan," Hooper says.
"Since everything happened" -- the phrase she and Andrew use to describe their lives post-scandal -- Hooper has become part of the Madoff family and even a manager of its public affairs. She encouraged Andrew -- who persuaded his mother, Ruth -- to speak publicly for the first time about the scandal last fall. If you watched them on CBS's 60 Minutes or NBC's Today, where Bernie's wife and son declared that they had no clue that the man they loved was a crook, you probably wondered, What is the truth? And who is the porcelain-skinned brunette standing by her man throughout the TV interrogations?
Hooper is, first of all, the CEO of Andrew Madoff's personal-renewal program. "Black Umbrella is my full-time job," he says proudly. He works 50 to 60 hours a week as director of operations at the company, which is 100% owned by Hooper. He doesn't take a salary; they agreed it wouldn't look right while claimants wait to receive pieces of their life savings that disappeared in the $65 billion Madoff scam. "A lot of people out there think he should never make a penny for the rest of his life and give up all he's earned since his bar mitzvah," says Hooper, 39, about her fiancé. It's not easy to feel sympathy for Andrew, 45, when he says, "I'm a Madoff victim too." But his statement, which he delivers with emotional coldness, is, by a certain measure, true.
While she works to rescue her boyfriend and his career, Hooper is also making a play on the zeitgeist: the notion that the world is less predictable and more dangerous than it used to be. "New York City is the third most likely major city, after Miami and New Orleans, to be devastated by a hurricane," says Hooper. Black Umbrella's clients pay $750 to $2,000 for services to help them survive hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, dirty bombs, even nuclear war.
Hooper launched Black Umbrella in 2009, and it's definitely not the next Facebook. She employs 11 people and generated less than $500,000 in 2011 revenue. But the business is growing. After she and Madoff found that customers wanted supplies, not just services, they began selling thermal clothing, bottled water, and all that gear in the spare bedroom -- and the average ticket multiplied. "I think emergency preparedness is in the same position today as fitness was before Jack LaLanne," says Hooper in all seriousness.
