Bernie to Have a Tough Time in Prison

clipped from www.bloomberg.com Bernard Madoff, scheduled to plead guilty today to masterminding the largest Ponzi scheme in history, may have to fight off prison inmates who want to squeeze him for money or blame him for the Wall Street crash. “Madoff isn’t going to be real popular,” said Larry Levine, who served 10 years in federal prisons for securities fraud and narcotics trafficking and now advises convicts on surviving time behind bars. “All the guys there will have wives or parents who are losing their homes or their jobs or who can’t send money to them anymore. Everybody’s going to be blaming Bernie.” “He’s looking at well over 20 years, probably at least 30,” said Ellis, former president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in Washington, D.C. “That’s a life sentence for him.”

"In the beginning, he will be besieged by mail that will be threatening and accusatory," says Park Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist at the David Geffen School of Medicine of University of California at Los Angeles. "There will be people trying to scam him and people who think he’s hiding money. There will be inmates asking for money, and you don’t want them to disbelieve you when you say you don’t have it."

I'm not sure I believe him when he says he doesn't have it.