Bernard Madoff, the former millionaire Ponzi schemer who traded his finance firm title for one in Butner Federal Correction Complex — as Inmate No. 61727-054 — now says he’s racked with guilt and can’t sleep most nights.
“I’m usually up at 4:30 in the morning because I can’t sleep,” said Madoff, 75, who will remain behind bars until 2139, CNN reported. And the insomnia is not due to his loss of his $7 million Manhattan penthouse, or his other homes in New York, Florida or France.
Rather, he told CNN that he misses his family, and he is racked by remorse for his oldest son’s 2010 hanging suicide.
“I was responsible for my son Mark’s death, and that’s very, very difficult,” Madoff said, in CNN. “I live with that. I live with the remorse, the pain I caused everybody, certainly my family and the victims.”
He then said, CNN reported: “Obviously, the main concern that I have is being away from my family. Married for 50 years, I had a very close family.”
Madoff’s Ponzi scheme began to fall apart in 2008. But he said in CNN that he started his shady investments in 1987, after Black Monday and his attempt to shield his investors from financial loss. One concealment led to another — and then it all snowballed, he said.
“It was certainly never my intention for this to happen,” he said, in CNN. “I thought I could work myself out of a temporary situation, but it kept getting worse and worse.”
His attorneys earned a reported $700 million in fees for his defense.
• Cheryl K. Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com.
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