US District Judge Denny Chin yesterday said the federal probation department had recommended that disgraced financier Bernard Madoff get 50 years in prison for a multibillion-dollar fraud scheme.
Madoff left his jail cell and was taken under guard to court yesterday to hear his punishment for running Wall Street’s biggest and most brazen investment fraud.
Dozens of people started lining up outside the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan three hours before the scheduled start of the 10am proceeding in a ceremonial courtroom that seats 250 people.
“I don’t care what they do with him. I don’t care if they turn him loose. Just get us back our money,” said Emma Devita, 81, who saved for 20 years with Madoff and says she is now broke.
“But I want him to be as poor as we are,” she said outside the courthouse.
The confessed swindler, who pleaded guilty to a slew of crimes in the same court in March, was to “speak to the shame he has felt and to the pain he has caused,” said his lawyer, Ira Lee Sorkin.
In a letter to US District Court Judge Denny Chin on Sunday, Sorkin argued for a sentence less than the life term requested by US prosecutors.
He disputed the size of the loss to investors, saying it “does not appear to rise to the historic proportions that the government has maintained.”
But Sorkin added that he did not “seek to minimize the magnitude of the crimes to which Mr Madoff pled guilty.”
Madoff confessed to running a multibillion-dollar “Ponzi scheme” in which investors were paid returns from money paid by later investors.
Investigators do not know how much was stolen, court papers showed. Prosecutors say US$170 billion flowed through the principal Madoff account over decades, and that weeks before the financier’s December arrest the firm’s statements showed a total of US$65 billion in accounts.
The trustee winding down the Madoff firm has so far collected US$1.2 billion to return to investors.
“Given the enormous amount of funds he has stolen and the number of victims, the sentence is going to be very, very high,” said Paul Radvany, a law professor at Fordham University in New York and a former federal prosecutor.
Madoff’s wife Ruth and other family members were not expected to be in court for the sentencing.
They have not attended any of Madoff’s court appearances since his arrest.
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