64bn dollar con king dies in jail
Biggest-ever Ponzi scheme fraudster Bernie Madoff was serving 150 years
FOUND OUT Madoff leaves court in New York in 2008
DISGRACED financier Bernie Madoff died in prison yesterday at the age of 82.
The former Wall Street titan passed away while serving a 150-year sentence, the Federal Bureau of Prisons announced.
Madoff suffered a sensational fall from grace after being convicted of running the largest-known Ponzi scheme in history.
For decades he presented himself as a trusted Wall Street kingpin while secretly engaging in investment fraud, prompting his sentencing judge to condemn his crimes as “extraordinarily evil”.
A spokeswoman for the prison bureau said Madoff ’s death was believed to be from natural causes.
Madoff had terminal kidney disease and several other illnesses.
He was held at Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina, after being sentenced in 2009 to a 150-year term for engineering a fraud estimated at $64.8billion, nearly €46billion at the time.
He sought “compassionate release” from prison last year to die at home, but the judge who sentenced him refused the request.
Brandon Sample, Madoff ’s lawyer, said in a statement: “Bernie, up until his death, lived with guilt and remorse for his crimes.
BETRAYED
“Although the crimes Bernie was convicted of have come to define who he was, he was also a father and a husband. He was soft-spoken and an intellectual. Bernie was by no means perfect. But no man is.”
Madoff ’s thousands of victims included individuals, charities, pension funds and hedge funds.
Among those he betrayed were the actors Kevin Bacon, Kyra Sedgwick and John Malkovich, and a charity associated with director Steven Spielberg.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel’s foundation lost millions. Other victims lost everything. Many of them were from the Jewish community, where Madoff had been a major philanthropist.
His crimes were revealed to authorities in 2008 by his sons Mark and Andrew, who were not part of the scheme.
In a typical Ponzi scheme, money from newer investors is used to pay earlier investors.
Madoff said his fraud began in the early 1990s, but prosecutors believe it started earlier.
It helped Madoff and his wife Ruth to enjoy luxuries such as a Manhattan penthouse, a French villa, flash cars and yachts, with a combined €690million fortune.
Mark committed suicide aged 46 in 2010, two years after Madoff ’s arrest, and Andrew died of cancer aged 48 in 2014.
He was by no means perfect. But no man is BRANDON SAMPLE MADOFF’S LAWYER