BEVERLY HILLS, April 15, (THEWILL) – Investment manager and Ponzi scheme leader, Bernie Madoff, is dead. He was 82.
Madoff, the financier who pleaded guilty to orchestrating the largest Ponzi scheme in history, died Wednesday in federal prison.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons confirmed that Madoff died of natural causes early Wednesday.
Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman, Kristie Breshears, said Madoff’s family was notified of his passing at the agency’s medical facility in Butner, North Carolina.
Madoff admitted in 2009 to swindling thousands of clients out of billions of dollars in investments over decades. They reportedly included the likes of baseball legend Sandy Koufax, Hollywood titan Jeffrey Katzenberg, actor Kevin Bacon and actor John Malkovich.
“His life has ended, but his larcenous legacy has been indelibly etched in investment lore,” said Sam Stovall, author of “The Seven Rules of Wall Street” and chief investment strategist at CFRA Research.
Madoff, known as Bernie, was a former Nasdaq stock market chairman from New York City, and was regarded for years as an investment sage.
Madoff’s decades long scam gave celebrities, charities, financial funds and ordinary investors lucrative, steady returns on their investments.
Income poured in, making Madoff and his family rich. His upscale lifestyle included a Manhattan condo, an oceanfront home in Montauk, New York, on Long Island’s East End, a vacation home on Nantucket in Massachusetts, and a three-bedroom vacation apartment in the south of France.
But unbeknown to his thousands of victims, he was running a Ponzi scheme that wiped out at least $17.5bn in savings..
The scam collapsed in December 2008, when Madoff’s businesses could not cover the growing withdrawal requests from investors who sought money amid the Great Recession.
For Madoff, the beginning of the end came when he confessed the truth to his sons, Mark and Andrew. They notified federal authorities, who arrested Madoff.
He pleaded guilty in 2009 and insisted that he alone ran the Ponzi scheme and masterminded decades of lies.
Federal judge Denny Chin called Madoff’s crimes “extraordinarily evil” and imposed a 150-year sentence in 2009. A true lifetime term more typical of the sentences imposed on the worst mobsters and violent criminals.
“One hundred and fifty years made me feel really good that for the first time, the government came down on our side and did the right thing,” said Michael DeVita, a Madoff investor from Chalfont, Pennsylvania, after Chin handed down the sentence.
For many of those who trusted and even revered Madoff, the collapse wiped out their life savings and retirement plans, leading to suicides, bankruptcies and home losses.
Some had to seek new jobs or move in with friends and relatives.
“We thought he was God; we trusted everything in his hands,” Elie Wiesel, the late Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate, said in the same year. Madoff’s scam cost Wiesel’s foundation $15.2m. Wiesel described him as “one of the greatest scoundrels, thieves, liars, criminals”.
Madoff spent most of his sentence at a federal prison and medical center in Butner, North Carolina, as inmate register number 61727-054. His fellow inmates included the late Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, who was convicted in a 1990s terror plot to bomb the World Trade Center and landmarks around New York City.
By early 2020, Madoff was confined to a wheelchair. He was suffering shortness of breath that required him to be hooked up to oxygen at night. And he had cardiovascular disease, according to his attorney, Brandon Sample.
Madoff’s lawyers filed court papers last year to try to get him released from prison in the COVID-19 pandemic, saying he had suffered from end-stage renal disease and other chronic medical conditions. The request was denied.
Madoff died at the Federal Medical Center, a prison for inmates with health needs, in Butner, North Carolina, on Wednesday, 14th April, 2021.
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