Whether the final tally turns out to be $16 billion or $65 billion, the sheer enormity of the fraud perpetrated by Bernard Madoff is too abstract for anyone other than Bill Gates or Warren Buffett to appreciate. But in the Manhattan courtroom of U.S. District Judge Denny Chin on June 29, at least for one solitary moment, the individual pieces of Madoff's towering Ponzi scheme were visibly and heartbreakingly revealed as human beings. And the world saw that ordinary people think in terms of small pensions, the preservation of nest eggs and saving for rainy days. Steadily, a federal judicial hearing transmuted statistics into tragedy.