Disgraced financier admitted to swindling
thousands of clients over decades, wiping out
their fortunes and ruining charities and
foundations, many of them in the Jewish world.

NEW YORK (AP) — Bernie Madoff, the financier
who pleaded guilty to orchestrating a massive
Ponzi scheme, died in a federal prison early
Wednesday, a person familiar with the matter
told The Associated Press.
Madoff died at the Federal Medical Center in
Butner, North Carolina, apparently from natural
causes, the person said. The person was not
authorized to speak publicly and spoke to the AP
on the condition of anonymity.
Last year, Madoff’s lawyers filed court papers to
try to get the 82-year-old 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 admitted swindling thousands of clients
out of billions of dollars in investments over
decades.
A court-appointed trustee has recovered more
than $13 billion of an estimated $17.5 billion that
investors put into Madoff’s business. At the time
of Madoff’s arrest, fake account statements were
telling clients they had holdings worth $60
billion.
For decades, Madoff enjoyed an image as a self-
made financial guru whose Midas touch defied
market fluctuations. A former chairman of the
Nasdaq stock market, he attracted a devoted
legion of investment clients — from Florida
retirees to celebrities such as famed film director
Steven Spielberg, actor Kevin Bacon, and Hall of
Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax.
But his investment advisory business was
exposed in 2008 as a multibillion-dollar Ponzi
scheme that wiped out people’s fortunes and
ruined charities and foundations. He became so
hated he had to wear a bulletproof vest to court.
Madoff pleaded guilty in March 2009 to securities
fraud and other charges, saying he was “deeply
sorry and ashamed.”
After several months living under house arrest at
his $7 million Manhattan penthouse apartment,
he was led off to jail in handcuffs to scattered
applause from angry investors in the courtroom.
“He stole from the rich. He stole from the poor.
He stole from the in-between. He had no values,”
former investor Tom Fitzmaurice told the judge
at the sentencing. “He cheated his victims out of
their money so he and his wife … could live a life
of luxury beyond belief.”
US District Judge Denny Chin showed no mercy,
sentencing Madoff to the maximum 150 years in
prison.
“Here, the message must be sent that Mr.
Madoff’s crimes were extraordinarily evil and
that this kind of irresponsible manipulation of
the system is not merely a bloodless financial
crime that takes place just on paper, but it is
instead… one that takes a staggering human toll,”
Chin said.
The Madoffs also took a severe financial hit: A
judge issued a $171 billion forfeiture order in
June 2009 stripping Madoff of all his personal
property, including real estate, investments, and
$80 million in assets his wife, Ruth, had claimed
were hers. The order left her with $2.5 million.

The scandal also exacted a personal toll on the
family: One of his sons, Mark, killed himself on
the second anniversary of his father’s arrest in
2010. And Madoff’s brother, Peter, who helped
run the business, was sentenced to 10 years in
prison in 2012, despite claims he was in the dark
about his brother’s misdeeds.
Madoff’s other son, Andrew, died from cancer at
age 48. Ruth is still living.
Madoff was sent to do what amounted to a life
sentence at Butner Federal Correctional Complex,
about 45 miles northwest of Raleigh, North
Carolina. A federal prison website listed his
probable release date as November 11, 2139.
Madoff was born in 1938 in a lower-middle-class
Jewish neighborhood in Queens. In the financial
world, the story of his rise to prominence — how
he left for Wall Street with Peter in 1960 with a
few thousand dollars saved from working as a
lifeguard and installing sprinklers — became
legend.
“They were two struggling kids from Queens.
They worked hard,” said Thomas Morling, who
worked closely with the Madoff brothers in the
mid-1980s setting up and running computers that
made their firm a trusted leader in off-floor
trading.
“When Peter or Bernie said something that they
were going to do, their word was their bond,”
Morling said in a 2008 interview.
In the 1980s, Bernard L. Madoff Investment
Securities occupied three floors of a midtown
Manhattan high-rise. There, with his brother and
later two sons, he ran a legitimate business as
middlemen between the buyers and sellers of
stock.
Madoff raised his profile by using the expertise to
help launch Nasdaq, the first electronic stock
exchange, and became so respected that he
advised the Securities and Exchange Commission
on the system. But what the SEC never found out
was that behind the scenes, in a separate office
kept under lock and key, Madoff was secretly
spinning a web of phantom wealth by using cash
from new investors to pay returns to old ones.
Authorities say that over the years, at least $13
billion was invested with Madoff. An old IBM
computer cranked out monthly statements
showing steady double-digit returns, even during
market downturns. As of late 2008, the
statements claimed investor accounts totaled $65
billion.
The ugly truth: No securities were ever bought or
sold. Madoff’s chief financial officer, Frank
DiPascali, said in a guilty plea in 2009 that the
statements detailing trades were “all fake.”
His clients, many Jews like Madoff and Jewish
charities, said they didn’t know. Among them
was Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust
survivor Elie Wiesel, who recalled meeting
Madoff years earlier at a dinner where they
talked about history, education, and Jewish
philosophy — not money.
Madoff “made a very good impression,” Wiesel
said during a 2009 panel discussion on the
scandal. Wiesel admitted that he bought into “a
myth that he created around him that everything
was so special, so unique, that it had to be
secret.”
Like many of his clients, Madoff and his wife
enjoyed a lavish lifestyle. They had a $7 million
Manhattan apartment, an $11 million estate in
Palm Beach, Florida, and a $4 million home on
the tip of Long Island. There was yet another
home in the south of France, private jets and a
yacht.
It all came crashing down in the winter of 2008
with a dramatic confession at Madoff’s 12th-floor
apartment on the Upper East Side. In a meeting
with his sons, he confided that his business was
“all just one big lie.”
After the meeting, a lawyer for the family
contacted regulators, who alerted the federal
prosecutors and the FBI. Madoff was in a
bathrobe when two FBI agents arrived at his
door unannounced on a December morning. He
invited them in, then confessed after being asked
“if there’s an innocent explanation,” a criminal
complaint said.
Madoff responded: “There is no innocent
explanation.”
As he had from the start, Madoff insisted in his
plea that he acted alone — something the FBI
never believed. As agents scoured records for
evidence of a broader conspiracy and cultivated
DiPascali as a cooperator, the scandal turned
Madoff into a pariah, evaporated life fortunes,
wiped out charities, and apparently pushed some
investors to commit suicide.
A trustee was appointed to recover funds —
sometimes by suing hedge funds and other large
investors who came out ahead — and divvying
up those proceeds to victims. The search for
Madoff’s assets “has unearthed a labyrinth of
interrelated international funds, institutions, and
entities of almost unparalleled complexity and
breadth,” the trustee, Irving Picard, said in a
2009 report.
The report said the trustee has located assets and
businesses “of interest” in 11 places: Great
Britain, Ireland, France, Luxembourg,
Switzerland, Spain, Gibraltar, Bermuda, the
British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, the
Bahamas. More than 15,400 claims against
Madoff were filed.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/bernie-madoff-who-orchestrated-16-billion-ponzi-scheme-dies-in-prison-at-82/

ttbaba:
Disgraced financier admitted to swindling
thousands of clients over decades, wiping out
their fortunes and ruining charities and
foundations, many of them in the Jewish world.

NEW YORK (AP) — Bernie Madoff, the financier
who pleaded guilty to orchestrating a massive
Ponzi scheme, died in a federal prison early
Wednesday, a person familiar with the matter
told The Associated Press.
Madoff died at the Federal Medical Center in
Butner, North Carolina, apparently from natural
causes, the person said. The person was not
authorized to speak publicly and spoke to the AP
on the condition of anonymity.
Last year, Madoff’s lawyers filed court papers to
try to get the 82-year-old 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 admitted swindling thousands of clients
out of billions of dollars in investments over
decades.
A court-appointed trustee has recovered more
than $13 billion of an estimated $17.5 billion that
investors put into Madoff’s business. At the time
of Madoff’s arrest, fake account statements were
telling clients they had holdings worth $60
billion.
For decades, Madoff enjoyed an image as a self-
made financial guru whose Midas touch defied
market fluctuations. A former chairman of the
Nasdaq stock market, he attracted a devoted
legion of investment clients — from Florida
retirees to celebrities such as famed film director
Steven Spielberg, actor Kevin Bacon, and Hall of
Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax.
But his investment advisory business was
exposed in 2008 as a multibillion-dollar Ponzi
scheme that wiped out people’s fortunes and
ruined charities and foundations. He became so
hated he had to wear a bulletproof vest to court.
Madoff pleaded guilty in March 2009 to securities
fraud and other charges, saying he was “deeply
sorry and ashamed.”
After several months living under house arrest at
his $7 million Manhattan penthouse apartment,
he was led off to jail in handcuffs to scattered
applause from angry investors in the courtroom.
“He stole from the rich. He stole from the poor.
He stole from the in-between. He had no values,”
former investor Tom Fitzmaurice told the judge
at the sentencing. “He cheated his victims out of
their money so he and his wife … could live a life
of luxury beyond belief.”
US District Judge Denny Chin showed no mercy,
sentencing Madoff to the maximum 150 years in
prison.
“Here, the message must be sent that Mr.
Madoff’s crimes were extraordinarily evil and
that this kind of irresponsible manipulation of
the system is not merely a bloodless financial
crime that takes place just on paper, but it is
instead… one that takes a staggering human toll,”
Chin said.
The Madoffs also took a severe financial hit: A
judge issued a $171 billion forfeiture order in
June 2009 stripping Madoff of all his personal
property, including real estate, investments, and
$80 million in assets his wife, Ruth, had claimed
were hers. The order left her with $2.5 million.

The scandal also exacted a personal toll on the
family: One of his sons, Mark, killed himself on
the second anniversary of his father’s arrest in
2010. And Madoff’s brother, Peter, who helped
run the business, was sentenced to 10 years in
prison in 2012, despite claims he was in the dark
about his brother’s misdeeds.
Madoff’s other son, Andrew, died from cancer at
age 48. Ruth is still living.
Madoff was sent to do what amounted to a life
sentence at Butner Federal Correctional Complex,
about 45 miles northwest of Raleigh, North
Carolina. A federal prison website listed his
probable release date as November 11, 2139.
Madoff was born in 1938 in a lower-middle-class
Jewish neighborhood in Queens. In the financial
world, the story of his rise to prominence — how
he left for Wall Street with Peter in 1960 with a
few thousand dollars saved from working as a
lifeguard and installing sprinklers — became
legend.
“They were two struggling kids from Queens.
They worked hard,” said Thomas Morling, who
worked closely with the Madoff brothers in the
mid-1980s setting up and running computers that
made their firm a trusted leader in off-floor
trading.
“When Peter or Bernie said something that they
were going to do, their word was their bond,”
Morling said in a 2008 interview.
In the 1980s, Bernard L. Madoff Investment
Securities occupied three floors of a midtown
Manhattan high-rise. There, with his brother and
later two sons, he ran a legitimate business as
middlemen between the buyers and sellers of
stock.
Madoff raised his profile by using the expertise to
help launch Nasdaq, the first electronic stock
exchange, and became so respected that he
advised the Securities and Exchange Commission
on the system. But what the SEC never found out
was that behind the scenes, in a separate office
kept under lock and key, Madoff was secretly
spinning a web of phantom wealth by using cash
from new investors to pay returns to old ones.
Authorities say that over the years, at least $13
billion was invested with Madoff. An old IBM
computer cranked out monthly statements
showing steady double-digit returns, even during
market downturns. As of late 2008, the
statements claimed investor accounts totaled $65
billion.
The ugly truth: No securities were ever bought or
sold. Madoff’s chief financial officer, Frank
DiPascali, said in a guilty plea in 2009 that the
statements detailing trades were “all fake.”
His clients, many Jews like Madoff and Jewish
charities, said they didn’t know. Among them
was Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust
survivor Elie Wiesel, who recalled meeting
Madoff years earlier at a dinner where they
talked about history, education, and Jewish
philosophy — not money.
Madoff “made a very good impression,” Wiesel
said during a 2009 panel discussion on the
scandal. Wiesel admitted that he bought into “a
myth that he created around him that everything
was so special, so unique, that it had to be
secret.”
Like many of his clients, Madoff and his wife
enjoyed a lavish lifestyle. They had a $7 million
Manhattan apartment, an $11 million estate in
Palm Beach, Florida, and a $4 million home on
the tip of Long Island. There was yet another
home in the south of France, private jets and a
yacht.
It all came crashing down in the winter of 2008
with a dramatic confession at Madoff’s 12th-floor
apartment on the Upper East Side. In a meeting
with his sons, he confided that his business was
“all just one big lie.”
After the meeting, a lawyer for the family
contacted regulators, who alerted the federal
prosecutors and the FBI. Madoff was in a
bathrobe when two FBI agents arrived at his
door unannounced on a December morning. He
invited them in, then confessed after being asked
“if there’s an innocent explanation,” a criminal
complaint said.
Madoff responded: “There is no innocent
explanation.”
As he had from the start, Madoff insisted in his
plea that he acted alone — something the FBI
never believed. As agents scoured records for
evidence of a broader conspiracy and cultivated
DiPascali as a cooperator, the scandal turned
Madoff into a pariah, evaporated life fortunes,
wiped out charities, and apparently pushed some
investors to commit suicide.
A trustee was appointed to recover funds —
sometimes by suing hedge funds and other large
investors who came out ahead — and divvying
up those proceeds to victims. The search for
Madoff’s assets “has unearthed a labyrinth of
interrelated international funds, institutions, and
entities of almost unparalleled complexity and
breadth,” the trustee, Irving Picard, said in a
2009 report.
The report said the trustee has located assets and
businesses “of interest” in 11 places: Great
Britain, Ireland, France, Luxembourg,
Switzerland, Spain, Gibraltar, Bermuda, the
British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, the
Bahamas. More than 15,400 claims against
Madoff were filed.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/bernie-madoff-who-orchestrated-16-billion-ponzi-scheme-dies-in-prison-at-82/

getting rich as this man in Nigeria and still die in prison is impossible....

If Madron had invested a quarter of these funds in multiple investments, he would have made it to the hall fame of all times as one of the most astute and brilliant minds of all times


Nothing beats strategy

Was it all worth it?