A federal judge sentenced Bernard L. Madoff to 150 years in prison on Monday for operating a huge Ponzi scheme that devastated thousands of people, calling his crimes “extraordinarily evil.”
In pronouncing the sentence — the maximum he could have handed down — Judge Denny Chin turned aside Mr. Madoff’s own assertions of remorse and rejected the suggestion from Mr. Madoff’s lawyers that there was a sense of “mob vengeance” surrounding calls for a long prison term.
“Objectively speaking, the fraud here was staggering,” the judge said. “It spanned more than 20 years.”
RELATED: Jeralyn at Talk Left has all of the relevant pleadings. The NYTimes yesterday on competition for a piece of the Maadoff pie. The Big Money on what to expect from the main players, including one victim’s preview of his speech. TPM’s M.J. Rosenberg on the court stripping Ruth Madoff of everything… except $2.5 million to live on.