Sympathy is one thing Bernie Madoff won’t see in the courtroom as he appears later this month for sentencing. The Poster Child for Greed, Madoff won’t likely see daylight in the outside world for a long long time. Many are urging the judge to give him the maximum 150 year sentence.
The Associated Press
More than 100 victims of failed financier Bernard Madoff’s multibillion-dollar fraud urged a judge Monday to sentence him harshly, saying he ruined their lives, leaving many of them depressed, bitter and hopeless.
“Please don’t let his brilliant criminal mind loose to do it again,” Steve Norton pleaded in a letter to the judge after describing how he lost $1.1 million in retirement money.
“He took the rest of our lives. Don’t give him his back.” Kathleen Bignell of Gunnison, Colo., said she told her 89-year-old father he cannot die because she no longer has money to bury him. She said Madoff “ought to be able to look forward to just exactly what he has done to us. No hope, no future and no forgiveness.”
In 113 statements, victims from across the country repeatedly referred to the 71-year-old Madoff as a “monster” who, as one victim put it, has “no soul, no remorse, no conscience.” Carl Kornblum wrote that he is 70 years old and his wife is 66, both forced by the Madoff fraud to sell their home and go back to work.
“Can you believe as teenagers and school chums and young marrieds we were once friends with Bernie and Ruth Madoff????” he wrote. “I really can’t believe Bernie could be such a sociopathic low-life!!! Thank you for all you can do to see that justice is served on this scoundrel.”
