madoff

 Bernard L. Madoff, the one-time senior statesman of Wall Street who in 2008 became the human face of an era of financial misdeeds and missteps for running the largest and possibly most devastating Ponzi scheme in financial history, died on Wednesday in a federal prison hospital in Butner, N.C. He was 82.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons confirmed the death, at the Federal Medical Center, part of the Butner Federal Correctional Complex.

Mr. Madoff, who was serving a 150-year prison sentence, had asked for early release in February 2020, saying in a court filing that he had less than 18 months to live after entering the final stages of kidney disease and that he had been admitted to palliative care.

In phone interviews with The Washington Post at the time, Mr. Madoff expressed remorse for his misdeeds, saying he had “made a terrible mistake.”

“I’m terminally ill,” he said. “There’s no cure for my type of disease. So, you know, I’ve served. I’ve served 11 years already, and, quite frankly, I’ve suffered through it.”

Mr. Madoff’s enormous fraud began among friends, relatives and country club acquaintances in Manhattan and on Long Island — a population that shared his professed interest in Jewish philanthropy — but it ultimately grew to encompass major charities like Hadassah, universities like Tufts and Yeshiva, institutional investors and wealthy families in Europe, Latin America and Asia.

Buttressed by elaborate account statements and a deep reservoir of trust from his investors and regulators, Mr. Madoff steered his fraud scheme safely through a severe recession in the early 1990s, a global financial crisis in 1998 and the anxious aftermath of the terrorist attacks in September 2001. But the financial meltdown that began in the mortgage market in mid-2007 and reached a climax with the failure of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 was his undoing.

Hedge funds and other institutional investors, pressured by demands from their own clients, began to take hundreds of millions of dollars from their Madoff accounts. By December 2008, more than $12 billion had been withdrawn, and little fresh cash was coming in to cover redemptions.

Faced with ruin, Mr. Madoff confessed to his two sons that his supposedly profitable money-management operation was actually “one big lie.” They reported his confession to law enforcement, and the next day, Dec. 11, 2008, he was arrested at his Manhattan penthouse.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/14/business/bernie-madoff-dead.html