Bernard Madoff reportedly en route to N.C. prison
WASHINGTON -- A law enforcement official says disgraced financier Bernard Madoff has been moved out of a New York prison en route to a North Carolina facility to begin serving his 150-year sentence.
Madoff is headed to the Butner federal prison, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss prisoner transfers.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, Traci Billingsley, would say late Monday afternoon only that Madoff was not at one of the agency's facilities.
He had been held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan, not far from the Ground Zero site of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, since March.
The prison agency, citing security reasons, said its policy is not to confirm the location of recently sentenced inmates until they arrive at the facility at which they have been assigned to serve their sentences.
The Bureau of Prisons website shows the Butner Federal Correction Complex is near North Carolina's Research Triangle area of Durham, Raleigh and Chapel Hill. It consists of a federal medical center for male inmates of all security levels, two medium-security correctional institutions and one low-security prison.
Under federal regulations, the lengthy prison term Madoff received at his June 29 sentencing made him ineligible for placement in a minimum- security prison.
Madoff's lead defense attorney, Ira Sorkin, declined to comment Monday, saying, "We have not been advised yet."
The 71-year-old disgraced financier was sentenced after admitting he bilked thousands of investors worldwide out of billions of dollars in a decades-long Ponzi scheme.
Contributing: Kevin McCoy
