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Bernard Madoff, who is serving a 150-year sentence in North Carolina for running a fraud scheme that cost investors billions of dollars, was physically assaulted by another inmate in December, according to three people familiar with the matter. After the attack, Mr. Madoff, who pleaded guilty a year ago and was sent to a federal prison in Butner, N.C., was moved on Dec. 18 to the prison's low-security medical center for treatment. At the time, the Bureau of Prisons said that rumors of an assault were false and that Mr. Madoff suffered from dizziness and hypertension. One of his lawyers,...

CONVICTED fraudster Bernie Madoff, who is currently serving a 150-year sentence in a US jail, was bashed by a fellow inmate in December, a report says. A former inmate told The Wall Street Journal said the fight was centered on money the attacker thought he was owed by Madoff. He said a prison officer found Madoff lying wounded on a floor. Madoff was treated for a broken nose, fractured ribs and cuts to his head and face, according to another prisoner currently serving time on drug charges. Madoff pleaded guilty last year to tricking thousands of people out of billions...

Fort Lauderdale, Florida (CNN) -- The photographs on the walls of Scott Rothstein's office at his law firm in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, were a who's who of Washington. There were photos of Rothstein shaking hands with former President George W. Bush and Rothstein with Bush's brother, Jeb, who is Florida's former governor. More photos showed Rothstein glad-handing Sarah Palin, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bill Richardson. And then there were the senators: Joe Lieberman, Mel Martinez, Arlen Specter and John McCain. All appeared happy to be in the company of a man who by some estimates contributed at least $1.9 million to...

None of them has been prosecuted yet in connection with Madoff’s massive swindle: brother Peter was chief compliance officer; Peter's daughter, Shana Madoff Swanson, was compliance officer; sons Andrew and Mark were co-directors of trading. Last month, a lawyer for Peter Madoff disclosed in a NJ civil suit that he was under federal criminal investigation. All have agreed to a court-ordered freeze on assets......the latest effort to squeeze Madoff family holdings, which once included three yachts, posh penthouses, summer mansions, artworks -- from Madoff's $65B Ponzi scheme. They “will incur no debt, obligation, or other liability, directly or indirectly, beneficially...

Entitlements: While a massive health care entitlement is fashioned in secret, another one, Social Security, is running deficits decades earlier than expected. We've been kicking the can down the road. We're out of road. As Bernie Madoff found out, any Ponzi scheme depends on a continuous inflow of new cash and new customers or the ever-expanding pyramid will totter and collapse. Social Security, dependent as it was on new workers paying the expanding benefits of retirees, is about to, much sooner than expected. As Ed Morrissey over at HotAir.com reminds us, Peter Orszag, now director of the Office of Management...

Here is a video report saying disgraced financier Bernie Madoff is being treated for serious "facial injuries," broken ribs and a collapsed lung after he supposedly "fell out of bed" in a North Carolina Federal Prison. Other reports had said Madoff had injuries "consistent with an assault." But officials now are saying the injuries are the result of him falling out of bed. . . . (VIDEO)

Reform: Only a Bernie Madoff could believe the Senate's health care bill will extend coverage to 31 million Americans while cutting deficits by $127 billion over 10 years. It would be the first profitable entitlement. But that's what Majority Leader Harry Reid, citing Congressional Budget Office estimates, tells us the 2,074-page bill — said to cost only $849 billion over a decade — would do. Like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, he seems to be following Vice President Joe Biden's admonition at an AARP town hall meeting that "we've got to spend money to keep from going bankrupt." We suspect Reid's...

Junk Science: The oracle of climate disaster has a new book out on global warming that should be on the fiction list. He asks us to commit economic suicide while he rakes in millions from his green investments. 'Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis," Al Gore's sequel to his 2006 tome "An Inconvenient Truth," came out Tuesday. Printed on recycled paper using low-VOC (volatile organic compound) ink, it will undoubtedly be a best-seller and on the desk of every attendee at next month's climate change conference in Copenhagen. In a press release announcing the book, the Oscar-...

PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) - Jeffry Picower, a Florida philanthropist alleged to have extracted billions from Bernard Madoff's investment scheme, drowned in his pool Sunday, police said. He was 67. The former New York lawyer and accountant had been a friend of Madoff for decades. A statement from Palm Beach police said Picower's wife and a maid found the body at the bottom of the pool Sunday afternoon and rescue workers could not revive him. Picower was transported to Good Samaritan Medical Center where he was pronounced dead at about 1:30 p.m.

Former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission chairmen and directors were generally unaware that staff were probing Bernard Madoff until the former financier was arrested in December 2008 for running a $65 billion Ponzi scheme, a federal watchdog said in a report released on Friday. The report underscores the disconnection between senior officials and their employees, who often lacked the experience necessary to follow up on leads and understand the magnitude of their investigation. Former Chairmen Christopher Cox, William Donaldson and Arthur Levitt, former director of enforcement Linda Thomsen and former director of examinations and compliance, Lori Richards, did not play...

Excerpted with permission of publisher John Wiley & Sons Inc "Madoff with the Money," by JERRY OPPENHEIMER. Long before Madoff became Ponzi king, he was scamming his way through Queens and LI, tricking suburban moms into buying overpriced sprinkler systems, inflating his golf score and taking the easy way out at school. HIS PARENTS Bernie Madoff was a born operator who always seemed to know his way around the system, even when he was a young punk growing up in Laurelton, Queens. Schoolboy Bernie was too busy thinking of ways to make money -- an endeavor impressed upon him at...

What's really behind the push in the healthcare bill to limit, by government decree, healthcare options? It's because of the government's medicare Ponzi scheme that makes Bernie Madoff look like just a simple short-game grifter. As Gary North points out, Medicare's hospital fund is already bankrupt: This is taken from a March 25, 2008 press release from the U.S. government's Department of Health and Human Services. This year the HI Trust Fund will spend more than its income, and from 2009 through 2017, about $342 billion will need to be transferred from the Federal treasury to cover beneficiaries' hospital insurance...

Bernard Madoff hires help to survive hard time (Bob Daemmrich/Polaris/eyevine) The 'Supermax' jail in Colorado where Madoff could find himself James Bone in New York Bernard Madoff has hired a veteran prison consultant to help him to find the best possible jail in which to serve his 150-year sentence for Wall Street’s biggest fraud. After his sentencing this week Madoff, now Prisoner No 1727-054, met Herb Hoelter, of the National Centre for Institutions and Alternatives, whose previous clients include the jailed Sotheby’s chairman Alfred Taubman and the financiers Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky. The draconian maximum sentence imposed by the...

*** Madoff's victims know their tormentor will never be released from prison. Judge Denny Chin's sentence was appropriate.....Madoff was one of the most vile and disgusting individuals to ever enter the criminal-justice system. NAMES REDACTED Upper Saint Clair, Pa. *** Now we can go after even bigger thieves, like Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and all the other social Democrats. Pine Bush *** The possibility of his wife and sons being convicted would be icing on the cake. Manhattan *** The very wealthy who lost money were victims only to our culture's most unattractive traits: greed and snobbery. You can't...

US, UK and Austrian prosecutors are investigating former Austrian fund manager Sonja Kohn, chair of Austria's Bank Medici, they believe was paid more than $40M in kickbacks to funnel billions of dollars to Madoff via separate companies she controlled, according to affidavits reviewed by The WSJ. Ms. Kohn apparently turned three Bank Medici funds into "feeder funds" that supplied Madoff with an estimated $3.5B from European investors. Kohn, a 60-year-old Viennese former Wall Street penny-stock broker, has repeatedly denied prior knowledge of Madoff's fraud or any wrongdoing. According to an April affidavit from DOJ filed with Vienna prosecutors, Kohn is...

Historic swindler Bernard Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison Monday for a fraud so extensive that the judge said he needed to send a symbolic message to potential imitators and to victims who demanded harsh punishment. Scattered applause and

MRS. MADOFF SUFFERS $UITE REVENGE--agreed to surrender more than $80M in cash and property to cover billions looted by her scheming hubby....the jet-setters will have to cough up more than $46M in securities and $13M in cash---a $7M Montauk, LI beachfront home, a $7.5M Palm Beach property, tens of millions in loans to family members and a 55-foot yacht. Feds let her have $2.5M they couldn't tie directly to the $65B mega-fraud. But the agreement offers no protection from collection efforts, including bankruptcy trustees seeking funds for wiped-out investors. US Marshals will "facilitate the expeditious disposition of personal property" including...

Attorneys for Bernard L. Madoff, who confessed to running a $65 billion Ponzi scheme, have asked a federal judge to show him leniency at sentencing, citing cooperation with federal officials. Madoff, 71, faces up to 150 years in prison when he is sentenced June 29. He pleaded guilty in March to a massive fraud, in which he paid off old investors with money from new clients. In the weeks before the fraud came to light, his clients were told they had as much as $65 billion. "We seek neither mercy nor sympathy," defense attorney Ira Sorkin wrote in a letter...

Friends... Please help me. Millions of people in the world suffer from a dread disease, but most don't even realize they are infected. The disease is Sao Paulo Afybrillitis-Macrodegenerative-Molaral-Ephedryl-Diticularism (or S.P.A.M.M.E.D). Each day children and some well meaning adults in third-world countries and remote places such as Hot Coffee, Mississippi come into contact with the Sao Paulo Kidney Rat and don't even know it. This results in exposure to the S.P.A.M.M.E.D virus which almost always ends in hundreds of people suffering with severe pain of the lower posterior region. Please do what you can to stop the spread of...

Hundreds of victims of Ponzi scamster Bernie Madoff are spitting mad at Irving Picard, the court-appointed trustee of Madoff's estate, over what they claim is the capricious way he is moving to clawback money. The group of 350 victims claims: * Picard -- whose job is to collect as much of the $23 billion lost during the decades-long Madoff fraud -- is demanding repayment from victims facing an "undue hardship," even though he promised not to do so. * The trustee refuses to speak with them when they reach out to him with questions or problems * They are being...