Professional swindler outlives both his children

Andrew Madoff, the last surviving son of the convicted swindler Bernie Madoff, has died at 48 in a Manhattan hospital, where he had been undergoing treatment for cancer. A family lawyer, Martin Flumenbaum, said the cause was mantle-cell lymphoma, for which Mr. Madoff had been treated since early 2013. His older brother, Mark, committed suicide in 2010. The two brothers attracted worldwide attention in December 2008 after they alerted federal agents that their father, a respected Wall Street statesman, had confessed to them that his private investment management business was a vast Ponzi scheme. Based on that report, the senior Mr. Madoff was arrested on Dec. 11, 2008, just in time to get on Santa's naughty list. Ruth Madoff, slowly rebuilding her life, called her husband’s crime “beyond anything imaginable.” After the arrest, it became clear that his fraud was one of the largest Ponzi schemes in history, with paper losses of almost $65 billion, cash losses of about $17 billion and tens of thousands of victims ranging from Swiss private bankers to labor union pension funds to notable charities and universities. Bernard Madoff, now 76, pleaded guilty in March 2009 and is serving a 150-year sentence in a federal prison in North Carolina. He will be 221 years old by the time he gets out in 2159 (if he lives that long).