Madoff loses bail appeal as victims' rage revealed

AFP - Saturday, March 21

NEW YORK, (AFP) - - A US appeals court denied bail to Wall Street fraudster Bernard Madoff, as prosecutors highlighted public outrage in a slew of emails demanding retribution.

The three-judge panel at the US Court of Appeals in New York upheld a lower court's decision to jail Madoff prior to his June 16 sentencing, saying that the disgraced money manager might try to escape.

Madoff, 70, faces up to 150 years in prison for fraud, money laundering, perjury and theft. Friday's ruling effectively means he may never spend a night outside a cell again.

For Madoff's thousands of victims -- unaware over at least two decades that he was stealing billions of dollars worth of their investment funds -- a life sentence is barely enough.

Emails sent to the judge who presided during Madoff's guilty plea last week boil with anger at the once-respected money manager, as well as bewilderment at the slow pace of the probe into his giant fraud.

"You are a murderer.... You are a rapist.... You are a larcenist," a victim writes in one of approximately 100 emails released to the media by prosecutors.

"You must be void of any human emotion, which makes you truly evil," another writes.

Victims represented in the emails run the gamut of rich investors who lost millions in Madoff's Ponzi scheme to those who invested much smaller amounts and now find themselves bankrupted.

One suggests to the court that Madoff be made to work in a supermarket, clean public toilets and "stand on corners and announce in 101 ways how he's a creep."

An email writer who said his family had lost their entire savings likened the situation "to a domestic holocaust" and said "we are being tortured to live... in a nightmare of fear and the unknown."

Another theme of the emails is frustration that Madoff's immediate family members, who were closely involved with his business dealings, have not been charged.

Madoff says he acted alone. Legal experts believe his scheme -- in which he fooled clients into believing that he was investing their money on the stock market -- would have required considerable help.

On Wednesday, prosecutors charged only their second suspect, the accountant who allegedly rubber-stamped Madoff's fake financial statements.

Prosecutors have also moved to seize millions of dollars worth of assets registered to Madoff's wife Ruth and their two sons, although none of them has been accused of wrongdoing.

Calling Madoff the "epitome" of everything "messed up in our system," one email writer urged the court to "make an example out of him AND his trophy wife and their trophy apartment and their trophy treasure."

"Your family members you are working so deviously to protect should be forced to live at the same poverty you have forced your clients and friends into," another victim wrote.

Madoff was arrested December 11. Before his guilty plea last week, he was free on bail, living at his seven-million-dollar Manhattan apartment under tight surveillance.

Defense attorneys argued to the appeals court that Madoff was highly unlikely to flee or to commit further harm to the community, the chief criteria for whether or not a defendant can be allowed bail.

But prosecutors said he was a flight risk and, given his confession to having lived a life of fraud, could not be trusted.

The appeals court accepted this, saying "the defendant's age and his exposure to imprisonment are undisputed, and the court did not err in inferring an incentive to flee from these facts."

Madoff is now held in a correctional center in downtown Manhattan.

Prosecutors say his Ponzi fraud, where money from new investors was used to pay fake dividends to existing clients, was "unprecedented" in scale.

But Madoff's most powerful weapon, according to his victims, was simply his reputation as a safe and honest dealer.

He was a former chairman of the Nasdaq stock exchange, a noted Wall Street innovator, and a pillar of the wealthy and tight-knit Jewish community in Long Island and Florida.

Many of his thousands of victims were friends and respected figures from the worlds of finance, entertainment and charity.