Madoff arrives at prison to serve sentence

Disgraced financier Bernard Madoff today arrived at a federal prison in North Carolina to begin serving a 150-year sentence for what is believed to be the largest Ponzi scheme in history.

Federal Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman Linda Thomas said Madoff arrived at the Butner, North Carolina, facility after leaving federal jail in New York City yesterday.

Madoff has a projected release date of November 14, 2139, assuming he gets early release credit for good behaviour while in prison.

He is listed in Bureau of Prisons records as prisoner number 61727-054.

The 71-year-old Madoff pleaded guilty in March to charges that his investment advisory business was a multi-billion-dollar scheme that wiped out thousands of investors and ruined charities.

Ponzi, or pyramid, schemes are nothing new, but Madoff’s was stunning for its size and duration. In a Ponzi scheme, early investors are paid by diverting money from new investors. When the flow of new money dries up, the scheme collapses and the fraud is exposed.

Authorities said Madoff had carried out the fraud for at least two decades before confessing to his sons in December that his investment business was a fraud and that he had lost as much as $130bn (€93bn).