Bernard Madoff, author of the worst financial scam in history and sentenced to 150 years in prison in 2009, asked to be released because he said he was dying. According to a lawsuit filed Wednesday with a federal judge of Manhattan by his lawyer, Madoff, 81 years old, requests to be released immediately, "by compassion" , because of a fatal disease of the kidneys. He is currently serving his sentence in a federal medical prison in North Carolina, according to data from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which displays a theoretical release date in 2139.
According to lawyer Brandon Sample, the Bureau of Prisons himself estimated in September that Bernard Madoff, at the origin of a pyramid-type fraud estimated between 25 and 63 billion dollars - depending on whether or not interest is counted - had "less than 18 months to live" . In telephone interviews with the Washington Post , the former financier explained that he was confined to a wheelchair and was not eligible for a transplant due to his great age. "I am fatally ill," he said. “There is no cure for this kind of disease. I have already served 11 years, and frankly, I suffered from it ” .
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Bernard Madoff, born into a modest family in New York, had never invested a single penny of the sums entrusted by his clients, drawing funds from new investors to compensate or reimburse the oldest. Long a star of Wall Street, his house of cards collapsed in December 2008, when an increasing number of investors, distraught by the financial crisis, had asked to recover their due.
Bernie Madoff was sentenced in 2009 to 150 years in prison, after pleading guilty to eleven counts, including fraud and money laundering. Two years after his arrest in December 2011, his eldest son Mark Madoff was found hanged in his apartment. A year later, in December 2012, his brother Peter Madoff was sentenced to 10 years in prison for accounting fraud. He is expected to be released from his federal prison in Miami in August 2020.