Madoff victims plead for life sentence
A total of 113 victims of the fraud have written letters and emails to US District Judge Denny Chin, almost all calling for a life prison term and some demanding even further punishment.
The judge could sentence Madoff, 71, to up to 150 years in prison. The former chairman of the Nasdaq stock exchange operated the fraud for decades, conning investors into depositing billions of dollars that were then used to pay fictitious returns. He was originally due to be sentenced yesterday.
“Please make sure the facility in which he rots is extremely uncomfortable,” wrote Jesse Cohen, a businessman from New Jersey who lost all his savings to Madoff’s massive Ponzi scheme, in one of the letters released by federal prosecutors.
Ron Weinstein, 62, wrote: “This scum should never again see the light of day.”
Madoff has been in jail since March after admitting guilt in the scheme, the biggest in Wall Street history and estimated to have involved about $61 billion, of which only $1bn has been recovered.
Natalie Erger, who described herself as “an investor sentenced by Madoff to a lifetime of financial ruin and emotional unrest”, compared the financier to Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein.
Many of the investors were elderly retirees who thought their life savings were in safe hands.
Norman Feinberg, a 70-year-old retiree, said he had turned to Madoff because of his “impeccable reputation”.
Carl and Alyse Kornblum, respectively 70 and 66 years old, wrote: “Can you believe as teenagers and school chums and young married we were once friends with Bernie and Ruth Madoff?
“I really can’t believe Bernie could be such a sociopathic low-life.”
The words reflected the frustration and outrage of those who relied on Madoff to handle their funds.
“You are a murderer,” wrote investor Phyllis Lerner, also calling Madoff, a member of New York’s elite Jewish society and a frequent fixture at golf courses in Palm Beach, Florida, a “rapist” who committed “generational theft”.
Jackie Stone called the former Wall Street star a “killer” and a “destroyer”.
“I cry every day,” she wrote.
William Cohen, another investor, said Madoff “is a psychopathic lying egomaniac who is still trying to feather his nest with a more moderate sentence”.
“Please don’t let his brilliant criminal mind loose to do it again,” Steve Norton pleaded in a letter to the US judge yesterday after describing how he lost more than a million dollars in retirement money.
“He took the rest of our lives. Don’t give him his back.”
Kathleen Bignell of Gunnison, Colorado, said she told her 89-year-old father he cannot die because she no longer has money to bury him. She said Madoff “ought to be able to look forward to just exactly what he has done to us. No hope, no future and no forgiveness”.
Some of the victims criticised the government for not doing more to help them.
And they reacted angrily at being portrayed in some published reports as greedy, saying they passed up riskier investments that promised higher returns for the steady profits reported by Madoff.
They also urged investigators to keep pursuing probes of Madoff’s family members on the belief that some of them had to know about the fraud or even had a role in it.
