Bernie’s secrets revealed by prison pen pal
WALL STREET CROOK DEAD
Bernie Madoff, whose $65 billion Ponzi scheme made him one of the world’s most hated criminals and destroyed even his own family, died Wednesday at the secure federal medical center in Butner, NC, where he was serving a 150-year sentence.
The 82-year-old fraudster, who had been suffering from end-stage kidney disease and other chronic ailments, died of natural causes, sources told The Associated Press.
Madoff would have turned 83 on April 29.
The federal Bureau of Prisons confirmed Madoff’s death but refused to reveal the cause, citing “safety, security and privacy reasons.”
During the final months of his life, Madoff tried in vain to get out of prison, seeking clemency from then-President Donald Trump and compassionate release from the BOP.
He also appealed to the judge who sentenced him, but that bid was opposed by prosecutors who said that his dying in prison would be “wholly justified.”
Madoff’s epic investment fraud, which came to light amid the global financial crisis of the late 2000s and remains the biggest in Wall Street history, left more than 37,000 victims in 136 countries in its wake.
Burned investors ranged from retirees who entrusted him with their lifesavings to celebrities such as Hollywood power couple Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, former Disney studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg and Baseball Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax.
Mets owners Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz were among the investors who cashed out their phony profits but later had to pay back ill-gotten gains — forcing them to sell a minority stake in the team and to slash its payroll, with predictably disastrous results.
They finally sold the team to billionaire investor Steve Cohen last November.
Madoff ’s massive rip-off was tied to at least four suicides, including that of his elder son, Mark, who hanged himself on the second anniversary of the fraudster’s 2008 arrest and left behind a bitter note.
“Bernie, now you know how you have destroyed the lives of your sons by your life of deceit. F–-k you,” wrote Mark, 48.
His younger son, Andrew, blamed Madoff for the recurrence of the rare cancer mantle-cell lymphoma, which killed him in 2014, also at 48.
“Even on my deathbed, I will never forgive him for what he did,” Andrew told People magazine about a year and a half before he died.
Madoff’s wife, Ruth, never divorced him but told “60 Minutes” in 2011 that she hadn’t spoken to him since Mark’s suicide.
The dramatic arc of the scandal led to countless news reports, dozens of books and an ABC miniseries starring Richard Dreyfuss and an Emmynominated HBO movie with Robert De Niro in the title role.
A Queens native, Madoff founded his eponymous finan
cial firm, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, in 1960 and began as a “market maker” who accepted buy and sell orders from brokerage houses.
His success led him to be named chairman of the Nasdaq three times and he also launched a hedge fund that he used to carry out his Ponzi scheme.
He cultivated an air of exclusivity by tightly controlling access to the fund, while also employing one of the oldest tricks in the book — the affinity fraud — by primarily targeting wealthy members of the Jewish communities in New York and Florida of which he was a member.
But his carefully constructed house of cards collapsed on Dec. 11, 2008, when he was busted by the FBI for securities fraud.
The arrest came as a result of a tip by his sons, who both worked for his market-making business, to whom he had confessed the night before — ahead of his company’s Christmas party — that his hedge fund was “all just one big lie” and “basically, a giant Ponzi scheme” that was on the brink of being tapped out.
When FBI agents showed up at his Upper East Side penthouse, one told him they were there “to find out if there’s an innocent explanation.”
“There is no innocent explanation,” Madoff confessed.
He pleaded guilty as charged in March 2009, admitting that his scam dated to the early 1990s and that “I knew what I was doing was wrong, indeed criminal.”
Judge Denny Chin later sentenced him to the maximum punishment for his “extraordinarily evil” crimes during a proceeding at which nine victims spoke, with some breaking down in tears as they described how he had ruined their lives.
Madoff delivered a monotone apology during which he claimed to “live in a tormented state” before turning briefly to face the packed gallery.
“I am sorry. I know that doesn’t help you,” he said.
In addition to his wife, Madoff is survived by six grandchildren; sister Sondra Wiener and brother Peter Madoff, who worked as Madoff’s CFO and served a 10-year prison term for his role in the scheme.