Madoff graduated from Hofstra University in 1960 and briefly attended Brooklyn Law School before quitting. I know that doesn’t help you.”īernard Lawrence Madoff was born on April 29, 1938, in the New York City borough of Queens and grew up there as the son of European immigrants who ran a brokerage out of their house. Madoff also addressed victims in attendance, saying, “I am sorry. “As hard as I tried, the deeper I dug myself into a hole.” “I believed when I started this problem, this crime, that it would be something I would be able to work my way out of, but that became impossible,” Madoff told the court. District Judge Denny Chin sentenced him.Īnd no family, friends or supporters submitted letters attesting to his good character or deeds in support of leniency. The money helped Madoff and his wife, Ruth, enjoy luxuries such as a Manhattan penthouse, a French villa and expensive cars and yachts, with a combined net worth of about $825 million.īut no one from Madoff’s immediate family was in the Manhattan courtroom when U.S. Investors were entranced by the steady, double-digit annual gains that Madoff seemed to generate, and which others found impossible to explain or duplicate. Madoff said his fraud began in the early 1990s, but prosecutors and many victims believe it started earlier. In a typical Ponzi scheme, money from newer investors is used to pay sums owed to earlier investors. They did not know he was running his fraud on a different floor. His brokerage firm was located in a Midtown Manhattan tower known as the Lipstick Building.Įmployees there said they felt like part of Madoff’s family. Madoff had been the largest market-maker on the Nasdaq, once serving as its non-executive chairman. “There were several times that I met with the SEC and thought, ‘They got me,’” Madoff told lawyers in a prison interview, according to ABC News. Securities and Exchange Commission, which through incompetence or neglect botched a half-dozen examinations. Madoff’s crimes were revealed to authorities in 2008 by his two sons, who were not part of the scheme. Many came from the Jewish community, where Madoff had been a major philanthropist. We trusted everything in his hands,” Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, whose foundation lost $15.2 million, said in 2009. Owners of the New York Mets, longtime Madoff clients, struggled for years to field a good baseball team because of losses they suffered. Madoff’s thousands of victims, large and small, included individuals, charities, pension funds and hedge funds.Īmong those 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. “Although the crimes Bernie was convicted of have come to define who he was - he was also a father and a husband. “Bernie, up until his death, lived with guilt and remorse for his crimes,” Madoff’s lawyer Brandon Sample said in a statement. Madoff had last year sought “compassionate release” from prison so he could die at home, but the judge who had originally sentenced him to prison rejected that request. He had been held at the Butner prison after being sentenced in June 2009 to a 150-year term for engineering a fraud estimated as high as $64.8 billion.
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