Convicted Ponzi-schemer Bernard Madoff won’t attend his son Mark’s funeral, according to CNBC.
Madoff’s eldest son Mark hanged himself Saturday by a dog leash on a metal ceiling beam in his Manhattan loft apartment. The death was officially ruled a suicide by hanging Sunday by the city medical examiner.
Madoff will not travel to the funeral, but instead will hold a private ceremony at the medium-security Butner Federal Correctional Institution in North Carolina where he is serving a 150-year sentence. His decision not to attend is to protect his family’s privacy, Ira Lee Sorkin, Madoff’s attorney, told CNBC.
“He will not be attending the funeral service out of consideration of his daughters-in-law and grandchildren’s privacy,” Sorkin said in a statement. “He will conduct a private service on his own where he is currently residing.”
The 46-year-old Mark Madoff died on the anniversary of his father's arrest two years ago in the largest pyramid scheme ever recorded. It followed the filing in recent weeks of dozens of lawsuits by trustee Irving Picard as he pursued billions of dollars in damages against those who profited from the multi-decade fraud.
Earlier, news reports said it is unlikely that Madoff would be allowed to attend his son’s funeral.
A report in The New York Post pointed out that the rules of the prison where Madoff is interned note that supervised furloughs to attend funerals of “immediate family members” are available only to inmates with two years or less pending on their prison terms.
The Inmate Handbook at the Butner Federal Correctional Institution states that “furloughs are a privilege, not a right, and are only granted when clearly in the public interest.”
A white-collar felon typically can receive an emergency furlough to attend a funeral, but the Madoff case “is a whole different ballgame,” Ed Bales, managing director of Federal Prisons Consultants, told the Post.
“I would question whether they’d grant him a furlough because of heightened publicity,” Bales told the newspaper. “He could be a target. He could be shot.”
WNBC reported Monday that Mark Madoff’s body is still sitting in a New York City morgue, two days after he committed suicide. No family member has yet claimed the body and no funeral arrangements have been announced, sources told NBCNewYork.
