He pleaded guilty to running the largest Ponzi scheme in history. So if you’re keen to watch Netflix’s new true-crime series The Monsters of Wall Street, you might be wondering where Bernie Madoff is now after he swindled investors out of tens of billions of dollars.
Born in 1938, Madoff grew up in a modest home in Queens, NY. Madoff carved his way into Manhattan’s elite circles to become what was once considered a titan of Wall Street. He was the former chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange, as well as chairman of his own company, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, which became the sixth-largest market maker for S&P 500 stocks after its founding in 1960.
He is also largely responsible for computer-aided commerce – an industry that now includes Google, Microsoft and Apple. Regarded as a “great innovator” as well as an “evil genius,” according to Monster of Wall Street director Joe Berlinger, per The Guardian, Madoff was sentenced to 150 years after pleading guilty to 11 federal crimes. But was he truly repentant, or in a final act of selfishness, was he choosing himself again?
Where is Bernie Madoff now?
Where is Bernie Madoff now? The disgraced financier died behind bars in Butner, North Carolina on April 14, 2021 at the age of 82. According to a death certificate obtained by TMZ at the time, his cause of death was revealed to be hypertension, atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, and chronic kidney disease. His manner of death was ruled natural given his advanced age. His body was cremated.
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What did Bernie Madoff do?
What did Bernie Madoff do? For 17 years, maybe more, the head of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities lived a lifestyle of luxury while ensuring clients were satisfied with consistent returns from their investment portfolios. At the same time, he and his wife Ruth and their children lived the high life, owning luxury apartments in Manhattan, an $11 million estate in Palm Beach, a $4 million home on the tip of Long Island, and an estate in southern France Enjoy private jets and yachts. These investor returns turned out to be a total hoax; Some investors’ money was used to pay out profits to other people.
On December 11, 2008, Bernie Madoff was arrested by the FBI after federal investigators received a tip from his sons, Mark and Andrew. According to documents filed by the FBI at the time of Madoff’s arrest, Madoff had actually told his sons that all of the family’s wealth and success was based on a lie — a massive Ponzi scheme that collapsed under the pressure of the 2008 financial crisis. Mark and Andrew immediately consulted a lawyer and were advised that they must report their father’s confession to the authorities. The very next day, Madoff was arrested at his Manhattan penthouse and charged with securities fraud, wire fraud, mail fraud, perjury and money laundering.
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“Of course greed was an element, but I don’t think he was blinded by greed. He’s a poor kid from Queens who was looking longingly across the river to Manhattan, who wanted to be a big player and just loved being the guy to be successful,” Berlinger told The Guardian. “One of the reasons the ponzi went ahead and got steroids was because his legitimate business was starting to fail and he was using that ponzi money to shore up his legitimate business because he wanted to be Mr. Wall Street. Ego and a sense of belonging to the big club of rich guys who run the world. It was less about greed and more about status and position.”
Madoff pleaded guilty to eleven counts on March 12, 2009. A few months later he was sentenced to 150 years in prison. According to Berlinger, Madoff pleaded guilty to stealing $19 billion from more than 40,000 investors, not because he was remorseful, but because he also managed a “substantial chunk” of organized crime cash and was desperate to protect himself.
During his sentencing hearing, Madoff apologized to his victims, saying, “I left a legacy of shame to my family and grandchildren, as some of my victims have pointed out. That was something I will live in for the rest of my life. I’m sorry. I know that doesn’t help you.”
But Berlinger doesn’t buy it. “People think he was one of the reasons he was so willing to admit his guilt and say he was, and going to jail wasn’t an act of courage,” Berlinger told the New York Post. “Instead of trying to cover up or find or delay a legal way out [a verdict]I think part of that was self-protection to avoid a mob attack.
In fact, in a never-before-seen statement in Berlinger’s documentary, Madoff said potential federal government deals were on the table at the time of his trial, as he had allegedly had ties to Russian crime syndicates for years. “The prosecutor wanted me to negotiate with them to make some kind of deal by providing information on who else was involved in this scam,” Madoff said during one such testimony. “The belief was that I can’t do it all by myself, that other people have to be involved.”
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Madoff: The Monster of Wallstreet comes from the same brain that gave us other true crime series like Conversations with a Killer, Crime Scene and Brother’s Keeper. It features interviews with whistleblowers, former employees, victims, and investigators in four-hour episodes.
One interviewee described Madoff as “a financial sociopath, a financial serial killer,” and Berlinger agrees. “At the end of the day he’s a financial serial killer and the reason I say that is because serial killers have no empathy,” he said in an interview with The Guardian. “There’s no way you can look a widow in the eye at Palm Beach Country Club and assure them their savings will be good, give me your money, I’ll take care of you, and then do that to the people. He is someone who lacks empathy; therefore cannot be repentant.”
Those betrayed by Madoff included celebrities like Kevin Bacon, who lost “most” of his money to the scheme. “We had the most money in Madoff,” Bacon told Smartless podcast hosts Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett in October 2022. “There are obvious life lessons there – if something is too good to be true, it’s too good to be true.”
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Other famous names ripped off by Madoff include New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon, former Philadelphia Eagles owner Norman Braman, Hungarian-born actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, Dreamworks Animation CEO Jefferey Katzenberg, actor John Malkovich , Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and broadcaster Larry King. The Madoff Victim Fund has paid back more than $4 billion to more than 40,000 victims affected by the program, according to its website.
Mark Madoff sadly took his own life in 2010 on the second anniversary of his father’s arrest. He had been sued a week earlier by Irving H. Picard, who initially sued him last year to recover approximately $200 million the family received in salaries. Martin Flumenbaum, attorney for Mark Madoff, said in a statement. “This is a terrible and needless tragedy,” he added, adding that his client was “an innocent victim of his father’s egregious crime who succumbed to two years of unrelenting pressure of false allegations and innuendos.”
In 2014, the disgraced financier’s other son, Andrew Madoff, died at the age of 48 after being treated for mantle cell lymphoma, an aggressive form of cancer. In an interview with the New York Times, he once described his father’s plan as a “father-son treason of biblical proportions.”
Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street is now available to stream on Netflix.
