Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff dies

NEW YORK • Bernard Madoff, who was convicted of running the largest known Ponzi scheme in history, died yesterday in prison where he was serving a 150-year sentence, the Federal Bureau of Prisons said. He was 82.

Madoff for decades presented himself as a successful and trusted Wall Street kingpin while secretly engaging in investment fraud, prompting his sentencing judge to condemn his crimes as "extraordinarily evil".

A spokesman for the prison bureau said Madoff's death at the Federal Medical Centre in Butner, North Carolina, was believed to be from natural causes.

Madoff had been suffering from terminal kidney disease and several other medical ailments. 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 US$64.8 billion (S$87 billion).

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.

"Bernie, up until his death, lived with guilt and remorse for his crimes," Madoff's 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."

Madoff's thousands of victims, large and small, included individuals, charities, pension funds and hedge funds. Among those he betrayed were actors Kevin Bacon and John Malkovich, baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax, and a charity associated with director Steven Spielberg.

REUTERS