Warning: This article contains mention of suicide which some readers may find distressing.
A former finance mogul who was once worth over $65 billion spent the rest of his life behind bars after a shocking scam was uncovered.
And the truth behind the business revealed the largest ever known Ponzi scheme in history.
Bernie Madoff kicked off his career back in 1960 when he founded a penny stock brokerage, which eventually grew into a much larger firm, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities.
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Working as the company’s chairman, Madoff also employed his two sons, Mark and Andrew, and his brother, Peter.
The wealth management business grew into a multibillion dollar empire over the years and at its peak, it was worth over $65 billion, but things started to unravel as the 2008 recession hit.
Madoff had been fraudulently using new investments to pay off other investors but under the financial slump, he began struggling to make ends meet.
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In December 2008, the former mogul confided to a senior employee, which was later revealed by Bloomberg to be one of his sons, that he couldn’t make the payments.
For years, Madoff had been using money from investors to deposit into his own business account, withdrawing from that same account when they requested redemptions.
To the sons’ surprise, their father then shared that he intended to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses out to employees months earlier than scheduled.
When Mark and Andrew confronted Madoff about it, he admitted that the business was ‘one big lie’ and a ‘massive Ponzi scheme’.
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His sons turned him into the authorities and in March 2009, Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 federal felonies.
In June 2009, Madoff was sentenced to a whopping 150 years in federal prison.
The then 71-year-old made a statement to the victims of his crimes, saying: “I have left a legacy of shame, as some of my victims have pointed out, to my family and my grandchildren. This was something I will live in for the rest of my life. I'm sorry. I know that doesn't help you.”
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Commenting on the fact that no letters from friends or family defending Madoff had been written, Judge Chin said: “The absence of such support was telling.”
The judge added that the fraud was ‘staggering’ and ‘extraordinarily evil’.
In December 2010, on the two-year anniversary of his father’s arrest, Mark died by suicide.
In 2014, Madoff’s younger son Andrew lost his life to lymphoma.
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Madoff spent the rest of his life in incarceration, dying in 2021 at a federal prison for inmates with special health needs.