(JTA) — Ruth Madoff, the wife of Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff, agreed to pay nearly $600,000 and turn over her remaining assets when she dies in a settlement with the trustee charged with recovering investments for her husband’s victims.
Ruth Madoff was never charged with any crime in her husband’s fraud. She will pay $250,000 in cash and hand over two New York trusts for her grandchildren that are valued at $344,000, Reuters reported, citing settlement documents filed Friday with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan.
Federal marshals sold the couple’s assets in 2009 and prosecutors allowed Ruth Madoff to keep $2.5 million. In June, trustee Irving Picard reached a settlement of more than $23 million in total with the estates of the Madoffs’ sons: Mark, who committed suicide in 2010, and Andrew who died of cancer in 2014.
Bernie Madoff, a Jewish New Yorker, used his position as the chairman of his investment securities company to swindle billions of dollars from tens of thousands of investors from the early 1970s until his arrest in 2008.
The uncovering of the scheme revealed the tens of billions of dollars in fake profit that victims, including many prominent Jewish nonprofits, believed they had earned through Madoff.
In 2009, Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 federal felony counts and is serving a 150-year sentence in a federal prison in North Carolina. He also was ordered to forfeit nearly $171 billion.
