Madoff victim fund covers most of Ponzi scheme losses: DOJ

The 10th and final distribution from a fund for victims of the late Ponzi scheme king Bernie Madoff began Monday, the Department of Justice said.

The last disbursement, of more than $131 million, is being sent to more than 23,000 victims worldwide. When it is completed, more than $4.3 billion will have been distributed by the fund to more than 40,000 victims in nearly 130 countries, the DOJ said.

That tally is nearly 94% of the estimated total losses from the scam, the department said.

The final disbursement by the Madoff Victim Fund was announced roughly 16 years after Madoff’s fraud came to light.

“Today’s distribution represents an unprecedented conclusion of victim compensation from civil forfeiture actions related to the Madoff scheme,” said James Dennehy, FBI New York Field Office assistant director in charge.

“These victims implicitly trusted Madoff with their investments only to ultimately lose significant monies to his selfish plan,” Dennehy said.

Madoff, who was head of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities in New York, pleaded guilty in March 2009 to 11 felonies related to what federal prosecutors have said was the largest Ponzi scheme in the world.

Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison for the fraud, which spanned four decades and involved him paying off customers with money raised from other customers, not with investment trading gains as he claimed.

He died in April 2021, at age 82, at a federal prison facility in North Carolina, nearly a year after he was denied a request for compassionate release due to a terminal kidney disease.

When Madoff’s fraud first became publicly known, prosecutors estimated the total loss at $65 billion. But that estimate sharply dropped once authorities subtracted the amount of phantom investment gains and interest that Madoff’s customers were duped into believing existed.

The largest portion of the fund for Madoff’s victims, about $2.2 billion, came from a civil forfeiture recovery from the estate of Jeffry Picower, a now-dead Madoff investor, the DOJ said.

Another $1.7 billion came from JPMorgan Chase as part of a deferred prosecution agreement with the DOJ in January 2014. JPMorgan Chase and its predecessor institutions had served as the primary bank through which Madoff operated his scheme, the DOJ has previously said.

The rest of the victims fund came from a “civil forfeiture action against investor Carl Shapiro and his family and from civil and criminal forfeiture actions against Bernard L. Madoff, Peter B. Madoff, and their co-conspirators,” the DOJ said Monday.