Ponzi Financier Bernie Madoff Dies At 82
By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News
(Worthy News) – Bernard L. Madoff, the financier who pleaded guilty and expressed remorse for orchestrating perhaps the largest Ponzi scheme in history, has died in federal prison, officials confirmed.
Madoff, who passed away April 14 at 82, became the human face of greed when his scheme finally collapsed
The one-time senior statesman of Wall Street greed became the human face of greed in 2008 when his scheme collapsed, and he was detained at his Manhattan penthouse.
By then, his enormous fraud left behind a devastating human toll and paper losses totaling $64.8 billion.
For decades “Bernie” Madoff was regarded as an investment guru by those trusting him. His clients included reported Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, filmmaker Steven Spielberg, actors Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, U.S. Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, and scores of retirees and other private individuals. Banks, hedge funds, universities, and charities came to rely on his improbably reliable reported returns.
Those who knew him said he used his image as a legitimate trader to lured — and eventually fleece— thousands of investors who entrusted to him their retirement savings, their children’s college funds, and their financial security.
With that money, he enjoyed the world’s riches with homes and boats strewn about exclusive enclaves around the world.
Madoff steered his fraud scheme safely through a severe recession in the early 1990s, a global financial crisis in 1998, and the anxious aftermath of the terrorist attacks in September 2001.
But the financial meltdown that began in the mortgage market in mid-2007 and reached a climax with the failure of financial giant Lehman Brothers in September 2008 was his undoing.
Hedge funds and other institutional investors, pressured by their clients’ demands, began to take hundreds of millions of dollars from their Madoff accounts. By December 2008, more than $12 billion had reportedly been withdrawn. More investors began seeking withdrawals of funds that Madoff did not have.
“His undoing recalled the downfalls dramatized in Greek tragedies: It was swift, excruciating and, in retrospect, inevitable,” The Washington Post newspaper commented.
On December 10, 2008, Madoff informed his sons, Mark and Andrew Madoff, that his business, the family’s extravagant wealth, and his investors’ flourishing portfolios were “all just one big lie.” The brothers turned their father into authorities.
“I live in a tormented state now knowing of all the pain and suffering that I have created,” he said in June 2009 when he was sentenced to 150 years in prison. He pleaded guilty to 11 felony charges, including securities fraud and money laundering. “I have left a legacy of shame.”
At his sentencing, a judge called the fraud “extraordinarily evil” and recounted a scene in which Madoff assured a grieving widow that her money was safe with him. “I’m sorry,” the defendant said before the courtroom.
He added, “I know that doesn’t help you.”
His massive scheme was publicly tied to at least four suicides, including that of his elder son, Mark. He 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.” It was followed by an explicit and signed “Mark, 48.”
Younger son Andrew blamed Madoff for the recurrence of rare cancer, mantle-cell lymphoma, that killed him in 2014, also at 48.
“One way to think of this is the scandal, and everything that happened killed my brother very quickly. And it’s killing me slowly,” Andrew reportedly said told a year and a half before he died. He vowed: “Even on my deathbed; I will never forgive him for what he did.”
Madoff’s wife, Ruth, never divorced him said in 2011 that she hadn’t spoken to him since Mark’s suicide.
Madoff suffered too. He reportedly had a heart attack in prison in 2013.
In February 2020, he asked a judge for compassionate release, citing end-stage renal disease and other ailments that had left him in need of a wheelchair and constant care.
The request was denied.
Madoff died at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina, apparently from natural causes.
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