Another victim, New York artist Alexandra Penney, who published a memoir titled The Bag Lady Papers about losing her savings, was blunter.
“I’m sorry he’s dead, because I wish he’d been tortured a long while more in jail, and I wish he’d been in solitary,” said Penney, who is renting a home in West Palm Beach, Florida, and who also declined to say how much she lost. “But now that he’s dead I will dance on his grave.”
New Yorker Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison in 2009 for running a pyramid-style scheme that conned tens of thousands of people around the world. The fraud was believed to be the largest in Wall Street’s history.
The cause of Maddof’s death was to be determined by a medical examiner. In February 2020, Madoff’s lawyer said the disgraced Wall Street financier was terminally ill with “kidney disease, among other serious medical conditions”.
“The Bureau of Prisons concluded in September 2019 that Madoff has less than 18 months to live because of the terminal nature of his kidney failure,” lawyer Brandon Sample wrote.
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He asked for compassionate release so he could mend fences with his grandchildren and die a free man but the request was rejected by the prisons bureau.The Washington Post reported then that Madoff needed a wheelchair and 24-hour care.
“I’ve served 11 years already, and, quite frankly, I’ve suffered through it,” Madoff told the paper in an interview.
“You know, there hasn’t been a day in prison that I haven’t felt the guilt for the pain I caused on the victims and for my family,” he said.
In a city famous for money and theatre, the silver-haired Wall Street doyen was a master of both, using his charm to wheedle billions from his clients who little suspected he was a con artist.
Madoff was born on April 29, 1938 to Jewish parents, in humble beginnings in Queens, New York.
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He started as a Long Island lifeguard before entering the stock market, eventually becoming chairman of the Nasdaq stock exchange.
There, he was credited with helping revolutionise the shift in trading from face-to-face deals, from telephones to computers, with trades made in seconds not minutes, and ushering in an era of ever greater stakes and profits.
But it was as a private money manager that he won a reputation as a financial guru.
Returns of around 10 per cent, with occasional surges a great deal higher, came in so regularly that rich individuals, endowments, and supposedly expert banks lined up to give him money between the 1970s and 2000s.
But in reality he was running a shell pyramid, or Ponzi, scheme – where new clients’ capital was stolen to pay off existing clients and create the illusion of returns, until it collapsed.
All the while he was living a life of luxury, owning several palatial homes, a Manhattan apartment, yachts and a private plane.
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Madoff’s fraud was revealed during the financial crisis in 2008 when he was unable to satisfy growing client demands to withdraw their investments, and many lost their savings or were unable to retire.
Even his Manhattan offices were phoney, with unqualified workers churning out fake statements and other paperwork, prosecutors said.
Faced with financial ruin, Madoff confessed the fraud to his two sons in December 2008. They turned him into law enforcement and he was arrested the next day. In 2009, he pleaded guilty to 11 charges, including fraud, theft and perjury.
Among others he betrayed were the actors Kevin Bacon, Kyra Sedgwick and John Malkovich; baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax; and a charity associated with director Steven Spielberg.
Owners of the New York Mets, long-time Madoff clients, struggled for years to field a good baseball team because of losses they suffered.
The Madoff family was marked by tragedy in the years after the scam fell apart. Madoff’s eldest son Mark killed himself on the second anniversary of the arrest. In 2014, his younger son Andrew died from cancer, blaming the fallout from the scandal for the disease’s return.
“Bernie, up until his death, lived with guilt and remorse for his crimes,” lawyer Sample, said in announcing Madoff’s death on Wednesday. “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.”
Bloomberg and Agence France-Presse
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