Madoff, who is serving 150 years at a North Carolina federal prison after pleading guilty to swindling more than $65 billion, has been telling fellow inmate he doesn\’t have much longer to live.
Trusted friend of the community on hot spot as fight over lost $400 million begins
The Ponzi scheme perpetrated by Bernard Madoff is the latest in a string of financial blows to Jewish aid programs in the former Soviet Union, wiping out a major foundation that was the primary funder of Jewish higher education in Russia
I wish Jews believed in hell, because then I could take comfort that Bernard Madoff will go there.
\” . . . We thought we were investing in Ezra, and now find out we were invested with Madoff. We feel duped and outraged . . . \”
At least two foundations have been forced to close because they had invested their funds with Madoff. The Robert I. Lappin Foundation in Salem, Mass., announced Dec. 12 that it would shut down after losing $8 million — all of its money. And the Chais Family Foundation, which gives out some $12.5 million each year to Jewish causes in Israel, the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, announced its closing Dec. 14.
\”It\’s all just one big lie.\”\n\nWith those words Bernard Madoff confessed to senior executives of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities that the $17 billion hedge fund he founded was nothing more than a Ponzi scheme. Madoff is at the center of \”the largest investor swindle ever blamed on a single individual.\”\n\nThe news that broke today on the front pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal reverberated in Jewish communities across the world. \”A lot of Jewish charities had investments with him,\” one prominent investor told The Jewish Journal. \”So did a lot of Jews.\”\n\nUPDATE: Among the victims was the Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles.\n\n
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