Bernard “Bernie” Madoff, a financier of Jewish faith, was sentenced on June 29, 2009, in Manhattan federal court to 150 years in prison for operating the largest known Ponzi scheme in U.S. history. The scheme defrauded thousands of investors and involved tens of billions of dollars in fabricated investment returns.
Madoff admitted in March 2009 that his investment advisory business was a fraud and that he had misappropriated billions of dollars of client funds. Prosecutors stated that the scheme began in the early 1990s and continued until his arrest in December 2008.
Victims of the fraud included individual investors, charities, pension funds, and financial institutions. Court filings showed that many investors lost life savings, retirement funds, and charitable assets as a result of the scheme’s collapse.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Department of Justice, and court-appointed trustees worked to recover assets for victims. By the time of sentencing, billions of dollars had been recovered and returned to some defrauded investors, though the full extent of losses remained significant.
