The man convicted of the largest Wall Street fraud in history was brought to a federal prison to start his 150-year sentence on Tuesday.
Bernard Madoff, also known as prisoner 61727-054, was moved to a medium security facility in Butner, North Carolina.
He is one of thousands of convicts in the prison complex. They include spy Jonathan Pollard, bomb plotter Omar Abdel-Rahman, and John and Timothy Rigas, a father-and-son team convicted in a separate massive fraud case.
Madoff was once the chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange and convinced thousands of people to give him their money to invest. He never invested a penny, but instead sent bogus statements to investors, and used money from new investors to pay "profits" to old investors, giving everyone the false impression the scheme was making money.
Embarrassed U.S. regulators missed the huge Madoff fraud despite several warnings and some inadequate investigations. Today at a congressional hearing, lawmakers discussed ways to improve regulatory oversight of the financial markets.
Some information for this report was provided by AFP, AP and Reuters.
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