Madoff: I just gave ... and gave ... and gave

A treasure trove awaits Bernie Madoff obsessives who log into the Web site for US Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of New York.

There they’ll find nearly 500 pages of verbiage — most taken from the fraudster himself — during two days of deposition for a lawsuit in April.

A group of so-called “clawback defendants” sought testimony from Mad- off in hopes of getting back some of the $65 billion that went up in smoke with Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.

“One of my problems was I always wanted to please everybody,” said the felon who ruined the lives of many.

The investor he tried tried to please most were called the Big Four: Beverly Hills money manager Stanley Chais, New York real estate broker Norman Levy, Florida accountant Jeffry Picower and Boston philanthropist Carl Shapiro. “I was like a son to them, and they were like surrogate fathers to me,” Madoff said.

But they were all partners in crime.

“They were aware of it,” he said when asked if the Big Four knew whether Madoff’s bookkeeper cooked the books. “They had instructed her to do it.”

The deposition even revealed the scammer had a civic side. Madoff called not going to trial his “biggest mistake” — yet appreciated that it saved “the government spending millions of dollars and years in a trial with me.”

Besides, he added, “I was [guilty] from 1992 on, which was bad enough.”

But the convict, who’ s not even a de- cade into his 150-year sentence, was at his most convincing when asked why we should believe him this time around.

“I have nothing to lose now,” he said.