Bernard Madoff, the one-time Wall Street titan who orchestrated one of the greatest deceivers in history, has died in an 82-year prison sentence.
Madoff, known as Bernie, was a former chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Exchange and was considered an investor for many years. But without knowing his thousands of victims, he ran a Ponzi scheme that eliminated at least $ 17.5 billion in savings.
Judge Denny Chin handed down a 150-year sentence in 2009, calling Madoff’s crimes ‘extremely evil’. His criminal behavior ruined the lives of his victims, leading to suicides, bankruptcies and home losses.
“We thought he was God; we trusted everything in his hands, ”said Elie Wiesel, the surviving Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate, in the same year. Madoff’s scam cost Wiesel’s foundation $ 15.2 million. Wiesel described him as ‘one of the greatest crooks, thieves, liars, criminals’.
Madoff died at the Federal Medical Center, a prison for health care inmates in Butner, North Carolina, apparently from natural causes. Last year, his lawyers filed court documents to release him from prison during the pandemic, saying he had a kidney disease at the stage and other chronic medical conditions. The request was denied.
In 2008, Madoff pleaded guilty to orchestrating a massive Ponzi scheme. Instead of investing cash, he pays older investors with funds from new investors. A court-appointed trustee has recovered more than $ 13 billion from an estimated $ 17.5 billion that investors poured into Madoff’s business.
The amount recovered was far less than the amounts Madoff told customers he managed. At the time of his arrest, fake account statements told customers that they owned $ 60 billion.
The global financial crisis of 2008 led to the scheme unraveling, and thousands of victims were deprived of their savings and Madoff was an avatar for the failure of regulators and financial corruption.
While investors worried about the looming crisis in December 2008 asking for their money back, Madoff convened a family reunion in his Manhattan apartment and admitted to his sons that the family business in which they both worked was based on a big lie. wash.
Following the meeting, an attorney for the family contacted regulators who notified federal prosecutors and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Madoff was in a bathrobe when two FBI agents arrived at his door unannounced on a December morning.
He invited them in and then confessed after being asked if there was an innocent statement, a criminal charge said.
Madoff replies, “There is no innocent statement.”
In addition to Wiesel, actors Kevin Bacon, Kyra Sedgwick and John Malkovich and Hollywood director Steven Spielberg were investors in Madoff’s company.
Madoff pleaded guilty in March 2009 to security fraud and other charges, saying he was “deeply sorry and ashamed”. After spending several months under house arrest in his $ 7 million penthouse, he was handcuffed to jail, amid widespread 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 during sentencing. “He deceived his victims out of their money so that he and his wife … could lead a lavish life.”
The Madoff family suffered a serious financial blow: in June 2009, a judge issued a $ 171 billion forfeiture order and Madoff of all his personal property, including real estate, investments, and $ 80 million in assets that his wife, Ruth, claimed, was removed from her. The order left her with $ 2.5 million.
But it also took a toll in more personal terms. In December 2010, Madoff’s eldest son, Mark, was hanged in his New York apartment on the second anniversary of the arrest of the billionaire investment manager due to the then-description of the biggest scam in Wall Street history.
His brother, Peter, who helped run the business, was sentenced to ten years in prison in 2012, despite allegations that he was in the dark about his brother’s misdeeds. Another boy, Andrew, died of cancer at the age of 48. Madoff’s wife, Ruth, survives him.
Bernie Madoff was born in 1938 in a lower-middle-class Jewish neighborhood in the New York borough of Queens. He started his career on Wall Street in 1960 with his brother Peter, with a few thousand dollars he could save as a lifeguard and installing sprinklers.
‘They were two struggling children from Queens. They worked hard, ”says Thomas Morling, who worked closely with the Madoff brothers in the mid-1980s.
In the 1980s, Bernard L Madoff Investment Securities occupied three floors in a Midtown-Manhattan high-rise. There, with his brother and later two sons, he ran a legitimate business as a middleman between the buyers and sellers of stock.
Madoff raised his profile by using the expertise to launch Nasdaq, the first electronic stock exchange, and so respected that he advised the Securities and Exchange Commission on the system.
But what the SEC never realized was that behind the scenes, in a separate behind-the-scenes office, Madoff secretly spun a web of phantom wealth by using cash from new investors to give returns to old people. to give.
Authorities later said at least $ 13 billion had been invested in the company over the years, using an old IBM computer that compiled monthly statements showing stable double-digit returns, even during market downturns.
But in reality, no securities have ever been bought or sold. Frank DiPascali, the company’s chief financial officer, said in a guilty plea in 2009 that the trading statements were “false”.
Agencies contributed to this story