Chances are, you're wearing some of Jodie Bernstein's handiwork. During the early 1970s, while working as a staff lawyer at the bureau that she now heads, one of her tasks was to reckon with another technological change. "Before World War II, there were four major fabric groups: cotton, silk, wool, and perhaps early rayon," she explains. "Everybody knew how to take care of those things. But after the war, all of these new fabrics came into being -- the nylons, the blends -- and people were complaining that they had no idea how to care for these fabrics. So their clothes would shrink, or get ruined some other way."
Bernstein led a team that crafted a new rule: Manufacturers would provide instructions on how to care for a piece of clothing by putting that information on a permanently affixed label. "It was enormously controversial," she says. Manufacturers howled. They sued -- and lost. "The rule's been so successful that nobody even knows how it came about. I think that's a badge of success."
Bernstein's journey to Pennsylvania Avenue began in Galesburg, Illinois, where her father owned a liquor store and her mother was a buyer at a department store. Bernstein was a superstar in school -- a fact that fueled large ambitions for a girl in the 1940s. "I cannot remember ever thinking that I was going to be a homemaker," she says. "I thought that would be boring. I wanted to go into politics."
After graduating from high school, Bernstein -- unlike many young women of her day -- went immediately to college. At the University of Wisconsin at Madison, she continued to soar, graduating at the top of her class. Her sights set on elective office, she decided to go to law school. In the fall of 1948, she found herself in New Haven, Connecticut, one of maybe 10 women enrolled in the Yale Law School class of 1951. How did she fare in such a highly competitive environment? The answer is on a wall in Bernstein's office: In a photo of the 1949 law-review members, the top students in the school, only two women are in the group. One is Patricia Wald, who went on to become a federal judge. The other is Bernstein.
But her turbocharged career would soon stall.
Upon receiving her law degree, Bernstein had moved to New York, where she was an associate at a large law firm. The man whom she was about to marry -- and to whom she has now been married for 48 years -- was a doctor in Chicago. She asked him to come east. He asked her to come west. He prevailed. Recalls Bernstein: "He told me, 'My career is going to be more important than yours, so you should come here.' I agreed, because I thought that was probably true."
Back in Illinois, she shelved her political ambitions. "As a Jewish, female Democrat, I didn't have much of a future in my hometown during the 1950s," she says. So for the next decade and a half, she lived in Chicago doing precisely what she had vowed as a little girl to avoid: She became a full-time homemaker and a mother to the couple's three children.
In the late 1960s, her husband took a position in Washington, DC, and Bernstein began scouting for something to do. Through her law-review buddy Patricia Wald, she landed a staff job at the FTC, where she worked for nearly six years under the tutelage of Robert Pitofsky, then-director of the Consumer Protection Bureau. After that, Bernstein worked at other government agencies and in private practice for nearly two decades.
In 1995, a new chairman of the FTC was appointed: Robert Pitofsky. He called his one-time aide and asked if she would head their former bureau. She said yes. One of her first steps as the new leader was to visit the agency's field offices across the country. On one visit, she asked the staff, "What's new? What's hot?" The answer was unanimous: the Internet. The staff showed her some of the scams that had appeared online even in the Net's early days. Says Bernstein: "I thought, 'We gotta do this. We gotta make this a priority.' " Then, sounding more like someone who is not old enough to vote than like someone who is old enough to receive Social Security, she adds, "It was a no-brainer."
In 1995, Augustine Delgado and three compatriots launched a Web site that made an audacious promise: Invest $250, recruit people, and, without ever doing another stitch of work, you'd earn $5,000 a month. The "Fortuna Alliance" may have operated in the new medium of the Internet, but it was the oldest scam in the book: a Ponzi scheme. Fortuna followed the same lather-rinse-repeat technique that Carlo Ponzi had deployed in 1920, when he cleaned out New Englanders of $15 million and earned his plaque in the hall of shame: Lure the greedy by promising huge returns for a small investment. Force the initial recruits to enlist more dupes. Use the proceeds from the next round of "investors" to pay off the first round. Skim off the top. Start again.
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