Bernie Madoff, who orchestrated largest known Ponzi onenewspage.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from onenewspage.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
BBC News
Published
image copyrightEPA
Bernie Madoff, a Wall Street financier disgraced after he admitted to one of the biggest frauds in US financial history, has died in prison at age 82.
His death was announced by the Bureau of Prisons.
Mr Madoff had been serving a 150-year sentence after he pleaded guilty in 2009 to running a Ponzi scheme, which paid investors with money from new clients rather than actual profits.
It collapsed during the 2008 financial crisis. Bernie, up until his death, lived with guilt and remorse for his crimes, his lawyer Brandon Sample said in a statement. 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.
Bernie Madoff, the disgraced Wall Street financier who defrauded investors around the world out of tens of billions of dollars in the largest Ponzi scheme in history, has died in a US prison.
In a statement sent to Euronews, a US Bureau of Prisons spokesperson confirmed that Madoff had passed away at the Federal Medical Center, a prison for male inmates with special health needs, in Butner, North Carolina, on Wednesday.
The spokesperson said the former financier had died of natural causes and confirmed that his death was not related to COVID-19. They said they could not share any further information regarding the circumstances of his death.
Fellow inmates reportedly sought him out for financial advice. Academics, attorneys and journalists clamored for his insights on the epic fraud he carried out.
After decades on Wall Street, Madoff knew a thing of value when he had one. So, in much the same way as he attracted investors to his fraudulent scheme by appearing to be aloof, Madoff was strategically stingy in his responses, parceling them out in what seemed to be a carefully crafted attempt to shape his own legacy.
My attempts to establish contact with Madoff began around the time he pleaded guilty to 11 criminal counts in March 2009. They included multiple letters to him in prison. Finally, on Oct. 20, 2012, he responded.