Madoff’s 150-year sentence only sounds excessive

Madoff’s 150-year sentence only sounds excessive

Charles Ponzi, the man who gave his name to the scheme that allowed Bernard Madoff and his family to live in obscene luxury for decades, only did five years in a federal prison for his crimes (and seven after that in a Massachusetts penitentiary).

One might conclude that Judge Denny Chin was too hard on Madoff in sentencing him to 150 years behind bars. Such a conclusion would be wrong.

Madoff made his billions the fast and easy way, but he came by his prison sentence the old fashioned way — he earned it.

Any reasonable prison term the judge pronounced would have been a life sentence for the 71-year-old Madoff, whether it had been 30 years or 150 years. Madoff’s lawyer was angling for 12 years, which would have been ridiculously short, given the breadth of Madoff’s wrong doing, and also would have provided an actuarial possibility that Madoff could have lived long enough to be once again be a free man. That would have given hope to a man who took hope away from thousands of investors and would have been a slap in the face to Madoff’s victims.

The sentence of 150 years effectively inscribed the message “abandon hope ye who enter here” above Madoff’s cell door. And it sent a message to the victims — many of them ordinary working people who invested their life savings with Madoff — that what happened to them matters.

What about the others?

But for us, there was another factor that demanded the maximum sentence for Madoff, and that was his refusal from the day his scam was exposed to cooperate with authorities in bringing to justice his accomplices. And make no mistake, he had to have accomplices. Some may have been relatives, some may have been highly paid accomplices in charge of sending out statements assuring investors that their money was safe, other may have been in-house accountants.

One man can’t keep all the wheels turning in a machine that eats up $65 billion.

And then there was Madoff’s conscienceless ability to spend other people’s money — and the money from charitable foundations — to provide for himself and his family a lifestyle of luxury, knowing all the while that eventually some of his victims would be reduced to poverty. Even as Madoff’s scheme collapsed, he attempted to shuffle assets around, and lawyers did manage to protect more than $2 million for his wife, Ruth, who claims that as her money, not the proceeds of her husband’s thievery.

The retired school teacher who lost her $250,000 nest egg might take comfort in speculating that lawyers will soon enough gobble up Ruth Madoff’s assets, leaving her in little better shape than the teacher. Justice virtually demands such an outcome.

Ponzi lived luxuriously, but not for decades, only for a couple of years in the early 1920s. More importantly, he died in poverty. That is how it should be for all who follow his unscrupulous lead.