Bernard Madoff, a well-known architect of grand securities swindle, died behind bars this very early Wednesday. He was infamous for burned thousands of investors, and outfoxed regulators and earned him a 150-year prison term.
Madoff demise at 82 at Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina. The news got hit by his layer and the Bureau of Prisons. Last year during the covid pandemic, Bernard lawyer’s asked by the court for his release from prison due to his medical severity. Madoff was suffering from end-stage renal disease and other chronic conditions.
Madoff’s cause is all-natural, as failing of health conditions in prison, as confirmed by one of his lawyers. His self-made financial image touched the sky for decades but later defied market fluctuations. His financial advisory was exposed in 2008-2009 as a Ponzi scheme that wiped out the fortunes of people and even ruined charities. Madoff was so hated because of his frauds as he wore a bulletproof vest to court.
The fraudulence was believed to be the largest in Wall Street history.
Over recent years, court-appointed trustees labouring to trace all fraud schemes to recover more than $14 billion, which is estimated up to $17 billion. Making investors outreach to maximum loss with Madoff’s business. His fake account statements were revealing something more critical on money matters worth $60 billion fraud.
Bernard Madoff pleaded guilty in March 2009 over securities frauds and other financial schemes. He committed “deeply sorry and ashamed” in court. The law lord penalized Madoff with several months of house arrest at his $7 million Manhattan penthouse apartment. He was taken to jail in handcuff to 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.”
Sample said in a statement that the financier had “lived with guilt and remorse for his crimes” up until his death.
“Although the crimes Bernie was convicted of have come to define who he was — he was also a father and a husband. He was soft-spoken and an intellectual. Bernie was by no means perfect. But no man is,” the lawyer said.
U.S. District Judge Denny Chin sentenced Madoff to the maximum possible term.
“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.
Madoff’s all property, including real estate investments and $80 million in assets, his wife Ruth is all seized. The judgment now left his wife with $2.5 million. Meanwhile, this biggest money scandal also imposed a personal toll on Madoff’s family.
One of his sons, Mark, killed himself on the second anniversary of Bernard arrest in 2010. His brother Peter is sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2012 by the court, though he claims his unawareness on brother’s misdeeds. Madoff, another son, Andrew died of cancer at 48; however, his wife Ruth is still alive.
Jerry Reisman, an attorney for about three dozen Madoff victims, said he’d spoken to several after Madoff’s death.
“Some of them are saying they’re enjoying this day,” he said. “No one sees this as a great loss. No one is going to mourn Bernie Madoff. They are happy they have survived him.”
On April 29, 1938, Bernard Madoff was born in Queens-New York, in a lower-middle-class Jewish neighbourhood. His story of rising and struggle took turns, and later, he left for Wall Street with brother Peter in 1960. He was years back one of the legends known in the financial world.
“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.
Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities exists in the 1980s, as occupied three floors of midtown Manhattan high rise. Larter with his brother and two sons, he owes a business as an authorized middleman between the buyers and stock sellers.
He even helps in the launch of Nasdaq, the first electronic stock exchange, and become one of the respected personality. Precisely even known to advise the Securities and Exchange Commission on the system. Later SEC found Madoff secretly spinning the web of phantom wealth by using cash from new investors to pay returns to old investors.
After an old IBM computer cranked out, he got red-handed, revealing monthly statements with double-digit returns, even when the stock market was a downturn. In 2008, later the account statements claimed investors run up with $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, Bernard Madoff and his wife Ruth Madoff live a luxurious life. Among all lavish properties and business, Madoff has a Manhattan apartment worth $11 estate in Palm Beach, Florida, and a home on Long Island, the tip of an estimated cost of $4 million. Madoff family inherits another house in the south of France, with private jets and a yacht.
It all came crashing down in the winter of 2008 with a dramatic confession. In a meeting with his sons, he confided his business was “all just one big lie.”
In total, Madoff was claimed with more than 15,400 fraudulent with lost of funds in millions, and the FBI came up with the end of no belief of his alone summary to do so. Later, to recover all lost funds, a trustee was appointed to date has returned the data around 70% only, and the investigating process was ongoing.
In 2009, Bernard Madoff was sentenced to maximum punishment. Madoff himself spoke in a monotone for about 10 minutes. At various times, he referred to his monumental fraud as a “problem,” “an error of judgment”, and “a tragic mistake.”
He claimed he and his wife were tormented, saying she “cries herself to sleep every night, knowing all the pain and suffering I have caused.”
“That’s something I live with, as well,” he said.
Afterwards, Ruth Madoff — often a target of victims’ scorn since her husband’s arrest — said she, too, had been misled by her high school sweetheart.
“I am embarrassed and ashamed,” she said. “Like everyone else, I feel betrayed and confused. The man who committed this horrible fraud is not the man whom I have known for all these years.”
About a dozen Madoff employees and associates were charged. Five went on trial in 2013.
DiPascali was the prosecution’s star witness. He recounted how just before the scheme was exposed, Madoff called him into his office.
“He’d been staring out the window all day,” DiPascali testified. “He turned to me, and he said, crying, ‘I’m at the end of my rope. … Don’t you get it? The whole goddamn thing is a fraud.’”
In the end, that fraud brought fresh meaning to the “Ponzi scheme,” named after Charles Ponzi, who was convicted of mail fraud after bilking thousands of people out of a mere $10 million between 1919 and 1920.
“Charles Ponzi is now a footnote,” said Anthony Sabino, a defence lawyer specializing in white-collar criminal defence. “They’re now Madoff schemes.”