Madoff son commits suicide in New York

The son of disgraced financier Bernard Madoff hanged himself yesterday in his New York apartment on the second anniversary of his father’s arrest for perpetrating Wall Street’s biggest ever fraud.

“Police are investigating a death. It is Mark Madoff,” a spokeswoman for the New York City Police Department told AFP. The NYPD said the 46-year-old was discovered by a relative earlier yesterday.

“Mark Madoff took his own life today,” family attorney Martin Flumenbaum said in a statement. “We are all deeply saddened by this shocking turn of events.”

According to The New York Times, Madoff was found hanging by the neck from a dog leash attached to a ceiling pipe in the posh apartment, while his two-year-old son slept in an adjoining bedroom.

The gruesome twist in the Madoff saga came two years to the day after Bernard Madoff was arrested for running a pyramid scheme that bilked tens of billions of dollars from gullible investors all over the world during a decades-long career.

Madoff senior was sentenced to 150 years in prison and there have been only a handful of other criminal prosecutions in the conspiracy that saw Madoff pose as one of Wall Street’s smartest money managers, while conning a who’s who of wealthy investors.

Although no criminal charges have been filed against Mark Madoff, he was being sued in a civil action by the US trustee trying to recover money for victims.

The trustee, Irving Picard, charges that Mark and other close family members benefited from the flood of ill-gotten gains that Madoff senior secured, regardless of whether or not they knew about the fraud.

Flumenbaum, the family lawyer, said it was the father’s excesses that helped bring about “a terrible and unnecessary tragedy” in Mark Madoff’s death.

“Mark was an innocent victim of his father’s monstrous crime who succumbed to two years of unrelenting pressure from false accusations and innuendo,” he said.

US media reports described Mark Madoff as having been crushed by his father’s betrayal of trust. He and his brother Andrew had worked with their father at his Manhattan headquarters office, but say they did not know that their father was running a criminal scheme in parallel to legitimate business.

The New York Post quoted unnamed sources saying that Mark Madoff had been exchanging e-mails with his wife Stephanie, who is in Florida with their four-year-old child, and that after the exchange she told relatives she was worried for him, prompting his father-in-law to check on the apartment yesterday morning.

Bernard Madoff’s fraud was believed to have been the biggest financial pyramid scheme in history.

He attracted billions of dollars from investors, then paid them steady returns, claiming this came from real profits, while in fact skimming funds from new investors’ capital and paying this money out.

The scheme was so successful that for years he operated without attracting more than occasional suspicion.

However when the US stock market and economy nose-dived in 2008 investors began seeking to withdraw capital. The money had by then evaporated in phony returns and in funding the Madoff family’s lavish lifestyle.

Picard has struggled to claw back the disappeared funds and has even overseen the auction of Madoff’s belongings, ranging from swanky houses to his socks, in an attempt to recoup the money.