BUTNER, N.C. — What upsets convicted Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff as he sits in his prison cell? “Not seeing my family and knowing they hate me.”
But as for the people he defrauded out of billions? Madoff says he “can live with” that. What’s more, he told ABC’s Barbara Walters, prison life isn’t so bad: “I have people to talk to and no decisions to make.”
RUTH MADOFF TELLS ’60 MINUTES’ ABOUT HER AND BERNIE’S SUICIDE ATTEMPT
In the off-camera interview conducted October 14 at the Federal Correction Complex in Butner, N.C., where he is serving a 150-year sentence for defrauding investors of billions, the 73-year-old Madoff described his life behind bars and his tattered relations with his family.
But he seemed to have fewer concerns about the victims of his massive fraud.
“I understand why clients hate me,” he told Walters. “The gravy train is over. I can live with that.
“The average person thinks I robbed widows and orphans. I made wealthy people wealthier.”
Madoff spoke off-camera because federal prison rules prohibit on-camera interviews.
As for his wife, Ruth, who told CBS in a separate recent interview that the couple had attempted suicide shortly after his 2008 arrest, Madoff said he was forced to “let her go” almost a year ago after their son, Mark, hanged himself.
The worst thing about being in prison, he said, was “Not seeing my family and knowing they hate me. I betrayed them.”
Asked what he’d like to say to his grandchildren, he replied without apparent emotion, “I am sorry to have caused them pain.”
Madoff told Walters that Ruth used to visit him at the prison weekly, driving 12 hours in each direction from their home in Florida.
But after Mark’s suicide in December 2010, the couple held a final emotional meeting at the prison and Ruth “asked me to let her go, which I understood,” Madoff said.
His wife’s lack of communication is the “hardest thing,” Madoff added. “Ruth doesn’t hate me. She has no one. It’s not fair to her. She lost her first son.”
As for life behind bars, Madoff said he had held six or seven different jobs, makes $170 a month and younger prisoners look up to him, albeit for the wrong reasons.
“I feel safer here than outside,” Madoff said. “Days go by. I have people to talk to and no decisions to make … I know that I will die in prison. I lived the last 20 years of my life in fear. Now I have no fear — nothing to think about because I’m no longer in control of my own life.”
He spends his free time reading, he told Walters, and recently finished a book about Wall Street robber barons.
He also meets regularly with a prison psychologist, who, he said, “has kept me alive” but acknowledged he had trouble sleeping.
In her interview with CBS, Ruth Madoff said she and her husband tried to overdose on prescription pills in December 2008 because “it was so horrendous what was happening.”
She said they had “terrible phone calls, hate mail, just beyond anything and I said ‘I just can’t go on anymore.’
“It was very impulsive and I am glad we woke up,” she recounted.
The third Madoff family member currently making headlines, Mark’s widow, Stephanie Madoff Mack, who recently released a memoir, and told ABC she held her father-in-law “fully responsible for killing my husband,” saying she’d “spit in his face” if she saw him again.