‘Tragedy goes on’ for Bernard Madoff victims after Ponzi schemer’s death in prison
- Bernard Madoff, mastermind of the largest financial scam in history, dead at 82
- He conned tens of thousands of people, many losing their life savings
The recovery effort, still under way in court more than a decade later, has been remarkably successful at recouping the lost principal, under the circumstances. But that’s little comfort to investors who lost their life savings or otherwise had their lives turned upside down. And none of them will ever see a cent of the US$45 billion in fake trading profits Madoff assured them was safely tucked away in their accounts for retirement.
“There are still people suffering vitally from what he did,” Burt Meerow, an 82-year-old Vermont retiree who declined to disclose how much he lost, said about the new king of the Ponzi scheme, also 82 when he died. “The tragedy goes on. He doesn’t.”
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.