Bernie Madoff, the mastermind behind the worst financial
scam in history, died in jail at age 82 on Wednesday, US prison officials said.
Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison in 2009 for
running a pyramid-style scheme that defrauded tens of thousands of people
around the world.
The scheme was estimated to be worth around $63 billion.
“We can confirm Bernard Madoff passed away on April 14,
2021, at the Federal Medical Center (FMC) Butner, North Carolina,” an official
with the federal Bureau of Prisons told AFP in an email.
The statement said the cause of death needed to be
determined by a medical examiner.
In February 2020, Madoff’s lawyer said the disgraced Wall
Street financier was terminally ill and wanted to leave prison to die.
Attorney Brandon Sample said Madoff was suffering from
“terminal 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,” Sample wrote.
The Washington Post reported then that Madoff needed a
wheelchair and 24-hour care.
He asked for compassionate release so he could mend fences
with his grandchildren and die at home but the request was rejected by the
prisons bureau.
“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.
A pyramid, or Ponzi, scheme is a form of fraud in which
returns on investments are generated only by bringing in fresh investments from
new victims. Cash from new clients is used to pay existing clients until the
scheme eventually collapses.
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.
New Yorker Madoff never invested a single cent of the money
the scheme’s clients trusted him with, instead using money from new investors
to pay older ones.
US authorities have seized about $4 billion related to
Madoff and aim to return it to tens of thousands of his victims around the
world.
The Madoff Victim Fund will disburse payments to more than
30,000 people around the world who were cheated out of their investments by the
crooked financier between the 1970s and 2000s, the US Justice department has
said.
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