Bernie Madoff sentenced to 150 years jail – but where is the money?

Bernie Madoff has been sentenced to 150 years jail for his role in one of the biggest frauds in global corporate history, but mystery surrounds the whereabouts of up to $US13.2 billion of missing money.

US District Court Judge Denny Chin imposed the maximum possible sentence on Madoff, who pleaded guilty to his role in a giant Ponzi scheme,

“Here the message must be sent that Mr Madoff’s crimes were extraordinarily evil and that this kind of manipulation of the system is not just a bloodless crime that takes place on paper, but one instead that takes a staggering toll,” Chin said in his judgement.

After the court heard from a number of Madoff’s victims, the man himself turned to face his victims and said: “I turn to face you, I know this will not help. I’m sorry.

“It was an error of judgement,” Madoff told the court. “As hard as I tried, the deeper I dug myself in a hole… I could not accept that I had failed.”

Madoff defrauded thousands of victims over a 20-year period, with prosecutors putting the loss at somewhere between $US13 billion and $US65 billion. While Madoff has denied the losses were this big, Chin said Madoff was holding back information.

“I simply do not get the sense that he has done all that he could or told all that he knows,” the judge said.

The long, hard fight to recover the monies lost continues. According to the Wall Street Journal, just $US1.2 billion of the $US13.2 billion lost has been recovered.

While victims may get payments of up to $US500,000 from the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, a government body set up to compensate investors for theft or unauthorised trading in brokerage accounts, recouping the rest of the cash relies on the court-appointed trustee of the defunct Madoff firm, attorney Irving Picard, selling off Madoff assets.

Last week, Madoff’s wife Ruth gave up more than $US80 million in an agreement with prosecutors, although she was allowed to keep $US2.5 million cash.

Overnight, she maintained she did not know about Bernie Madoff’s massive fraud. “The man who committed this horrible fraud is not the man whom I have known for all these years,” she said in a statement.

But while victim groups have applauded Madoff’s massive sentence, it should be noted that some legal experts are less than impressed.

Andrew Cohen, chief legal analyst at US news network CBS described the sentence as “legally suspect and grossly unfair when compared to the other sentences handed out to other major corporate fraud figures recently”, pointing out that white collar criminals such as Worldcom boss Bernie Ebbers and Enron executive Jeffrey Skilling received sentences of 25 years and 24 years, respectively.

“I think it was the judicial equivalent of a cheap shot, offered by a gutless, intellectually lazy judge who had the luxury of having an angry mob on his side and the knowledge that Madoff already had conceded the case and the notion that he would die in prison,” Cohen says.