Bernard Madoff, Architect of Largest Ponzi Scheme in History, Is Dead at 82
His enormous fraud left behind a devastating human toll and paper losses totaling $64.8 billion.
Bernie Madoff leaving a Manhattan court in January 2009. The victims of his fraud numbered in the thousands and were scattered from Palm Beach to the Persian Gulf.Credit.Hiroko Masuike/Getty Images
April 14, 2021Updated 11:27 a.m. ET
Bernard L. Madoff, the one-time senior statesman of Wall Street who in 2008 became the human face of an era of financial misdeeds and missteps for running the largest and possibly most devastating Ponzi scheme in financial history, died on Wednesday at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, N.C. He was 82.