Bernard Madoff’s death in prison Wednesday doesn’t change much for his victims, many of whom are still waiting to be made whole on their share of $20 billion that vanished with the con man’s 2008 arrest.
The recovery effort, still underway 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 $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 in an interview 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.”
Emotions still run high for Richard B. Shapiro, too. The 67-year-old Hidden Hills, California, real estate investor, who lost “in the seven figures” with Madoff and calls him a “psychopath,” said he’s never forgotten the shock of the news of Madoff’s arrest. He remembers the scam falling apart the way people remember the 9/11 terror attack or President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, he said.
“I hope he rots in hell,” said Shapiro, who was introduced to Madoff by a friend and started investing with him in the 1990s. “He got off easier, and I have no compassion for him or his family in any way, shape or form.”
Shapiro said he ultimately sold the bankruptcy claims for his two Madoff accounts, one for 61.5 cents on the dollar and the other—too early, he lamented—for 35, to help kick-start his financial recovery.
Madoff, who pleaded guilty to securities fraud in 2009, was serving a 150-year sentence at a federal prison in Butner, North Carolina. Five of his top aides were convicted at trial in 2014. Several others, including his brother Peter, pleaded guilty.
Madoff’s Life And Times
• April 29, 1938: Madoff is born in NYC borough of Queens
• 1960: Founds stock brokerage that becomes Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities
• 1990: Becomes chairman of Nasdaq, serves for three different years
• Dec. 11, 2008: Arrested as Ponzi scheme is exposed
• June 29, 2009: Sentenced to 150 years in prison
• April 14, 2021: Dies in prison after failing to win early release
The Madoff family was marked by tragedy in the years after the scam fell apart. Madoff’s elder son Mark, who was head of sales at the company’s legitimate market-making business, committed suicide in 2010, on the two-year anniversary of his father’s arrest. His younger son Andrew, who as head of equities helped build the company’s proprietary trading desk, died of cancer in 2014. Neither son was charged. The con man’s wife, Ruth Madoff, has been living in obscurity, most recently in Connecticut, after being forced from their luxurious Upper East Side home.