Bernie Madoff is Dead at 82 While Serving 150 Year Prison Sentence

The mastermind behind the biggest investment fraud that has occurred in United States history, Bernie Madoff, has passed away in prison at the age of 82.

Madoff had been serving a 150-year prison sentence for a scheme that investigators said defrauded as many as 37,000 people in 136 countries over four decades.

Among the victims were Steven Spielberg and Kevin Bacon as well as ordinary investors. Madoff had ripped off as much as $65 billion from tends of thousands of clients.

Madoff’s death at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina, was confirmed by the federal Bureau of Prisons. He had died of natural causes according to an AP report that cited an unidentified person familiar with the situation.

Madoff was sbeing treated for what his attorney called terminal kidney disease. His request for compassionate release from prison was denied last June. A judge denied the request, saying Madoff committed “one of the most egregious financial crimes of all time,” and that “many people are still suffering.”

It was in 2009 that Madoff had pleaded guilty to the scheme that investigators believed started as early as the 1970’s. His two sons had turned him in.

Madoff insisted the fraud did not begin until the early 1990s however, when, “the market stalled due to the onset of the recession and the Gulf War.”

Speaking to CNBC in 2013 from prison, Madoff claimed the break in the market that started the Great Recession led to his scheme.

“I thought this would be only a short-term trade which could be made up once the market became receptive,” he wrote. “The rest is my tragic history of never being able to recover.”

“You know there hasn’t been a day in prison that I haven’t felt the guilt for the pain I caused on the victims and for my family,” Madoff told The Washington Post last summer. He said his goal was to explain his actions to his grandchildren.

“You know I lost both my sons, and my wife is not really well. So it’s horrible,” he told the Post. “I was very close with my family. I made a terrible mistake. And you know I suffer with it. I’ll suffer with it when I get out.”