Bernard Madoff
The multi-billion dollar Ponzi schemer was sentenced to 150 years in prison.
Dec. 14, 2009 — -- This was a busy year for the man for whom the Bernie Awards were named . The architect of a $65 billion Ponzi scheme, a scam that may be the biggest Wall Street con job ever, pleaded guilty to 11 counts of fraud in March, was sentenced to 150 years in June, and will end the year in a federal prison in North Carolina.
He will also end his life in federal prison, since he is 71 years old and there is no parole in the federal system.
Madoff admitted in his guilty plea that after 1991 he made no legitimate investments, instead placing his clients' money in a bank account. He created false paperwork to convince his clients and the SEC that he was engaged in legitimate trading.
His investors, meanwhile, will end 2009 knowing that so far only $1.5 billion in Madoff assets have been recovered, and that more than half of investors have had their claims for losses denied by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, the agency that insures brokerage accounts, because they took out more money than they put in over the years.
The SEC found that six times between 1992 and 2008, it had launched investigations of Madoff and still failed to detect his Ponzi scheme.
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