Bernie Madoff, the former Wall Street financier who was convicted of carrying out a massive Ponzi scheme, died in prison on Wednesday morning at age 82, a Bureau of Prisons spokesperson told The Daily Beast.
Madoff was carrying out his sentence at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina, due to a terminal kidney disease. His death was of natural causes, The Associated Press reports, and is not believed to be COVID-19 related. In 2009, Madoff pleaded guilty and admitted to "swindling thousands of clients out of billions of dollars in investments over decades," writes AP. He was sentenced to 150 years in prison. Madoff said he was "deeply sorry and ashamed."
His scheme, considered the largest in U.S. history, nabbed an estimated $17.5 billion from investors, and "around $13 billion has been recovered since his conviction," reports The Daily Beast.
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