Madoff victims fire back again: ‘The man can be a monster’
Ilene Kent, a victims’ advocate whose dad and mom lost the bulk of their existence cost savings to Madoff, calls the Ponzi schemer a “pathological liar.”
Victims of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme are infuriated with his most recent jailhouse interview, where he blames his victims for being “greedy.”
“The guy is really a monster, a liar, a thief with definitely no morals, no regrets, no shame,” stated Stephanie Halio, whose retirement fund was wiped out by Madoff’s scheme. “And he portrays his victims as greedy?”
Halio, 67, says that she and her 70-year-old husband are actually pressured to abandon retirement and go back to work since Madoff was discovered in 2008.
“He is psychologically transferring his greed towards the victims,” Halio said. “He lied by way of his teeth to the whole planet. He bankrupted whole generations of families. He bankrupted charities. It was completely perverted.”
In an interview with New york Magazine, Madoff placed some of the blame of his long-running pyramid-style scheme squarely to the shoulders of your folks he ripped off, stating they need to have had “doubts” concerning the double-digit returns they obtained from his firm.
“I do not wish to be lectured by Bernie Madoff about individuals being greedy,” mentioned Ilene Kent, a victims’ advocate whose mother and father misplaced 70% of their daily life financial savings to Madoff.
“He’s clearly a pathological liar,” Kent said. “How are you able to think a man who pulled off the largest monetary crime inside the history of your globe? He only cares about himself and producing himself search excellent, deflecting the blame.”
When Madoff’s rip-off finally collapsed together with his arrest on Dec. 11, 2008, it grew to become apparent that his returns were fraudulent and that he was not in fact investing the dollars he acquired from investors.
To keep his rip-off going, Madoff would shell out off longer-standing investors with cash taken from contemporary traders, and fraudulently existing these payments as respectable returns from Wall Road investments.
Meanwhile, Madoff lived an affluent lifestyle. He owned homes in Manhattan, Florida and France, along with a yacht and diamond-encrusted jewellery for him and his spouse, Ruth.
Madoff pleaded guilty in March 2009 to orchestrating the largest, most sweeping Ponzi scheme in background and bilking a large number of traders from an approximated $20 billion.
The court-appointed trustee cleaning up after Madoff has recognized 2,404 traders as eligible victims for about $6.8 billion in recovered assets, but a lot more than sixteen,000 investors have filed statements.
Attorneys make hundreds of thousands off Madoff mess
Like other burned traders, Mike De Vita, who misplaced his retirement savings to Madoff’s rip-off, mentioned he took umbrage with Madoff’s claim that traders should have had “doubts” about returns ranging from 15% to 18%. He stated that almost all traders didn’t obtain returns that had been anyplace close to that significant, and as a result had no reason to become suspicious of implausible finances.
De Vita stated that his very own returns averaged 10.5% over 18 several years, peaking as higher as 13% in 1 yr, and dropping as low as 8% in one more. He stated that Madoff is painting an inaccurate and unsympathetic image from the victims.
“Is he definitely trying to vindicate what he did?” stated De Vita. “Is he actually trying to enrich his ego, which appears to be as huge because the Empire State Constructing?”
Meanwhile, Madoff is serving a 150-year sentence in a federal prison in Butner, N.C., where he told the magazine that his “notoriety impresses” one other prisoners. But De Vita suspects that is not sufficient interest for Madoff.
“He’s received an ego that can’t be fed adequately inside the prison walls,” said De Vita
