(Caitlin Thorne)
Boca Raton, FL_ (
)
Palm Beach, FL (
)
She’s hasn’t donned sackcloth and ashes, but Ruth Madoff is trying to repent.
Like the biblical Ruth, the disgraced wife of jailed Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff is depending on relatives for sustenance, and searching for redemption by volunteering for charity work.
The formerly monied Manhattan matron has fled to south Florida, where she bunks with relatives and apparently does God’s work, delivering meals to the homebound, The Post has learned.
The former billionaire’s wife has been reduced to driving around in a 14-year-old clunker, with a parking placard in the back seat that reads, “homebound delivery volunteer driver.”
She registered the 1996 Infiniti she bought in January for a “few thousand” to sister Joan Roman’s Boca Raton address in a middle-class condo complex.
The units there, which go for a measly $300,000, are painted a tacky Florida orange and are hidden behind security gates..
She regularly pops up at her sister’s home. But when she wants a taste of the high life she once enjoyed, the well-preserved 67-year-old mooches at brother-in-law Peter Madoff’s $4.5 million Palm Beach mansion.
The sprawling two-story waterfront home features polished stone floors and antique furnishings visible through eight-foot windows.
Neighbors around the manse — where the local postman says he delivers Ruth’s mail — claim she lives there, and report seeing a woman in dark sunglasses they believe to be Ruth strolling to the nearby beach.
“She doesn’t own a home, friends and relatives have been kind enough to give her places to stay,” her lawyer, Peter Chavkin, told The Post.
Madoff, who now often uses her maiden name Alpern, has been spurned by numerous New York co-op boards and landlords, who refused to sell or rent to her after she was booted by federal authorities from her luxury Upper East Side condo.
The former society queen’s luxury life went up in flames when her husband was convicted of bilking $65 billion from thousands of clients — an elaborate scam that funded the Madoff family’s high-flying lifestyle for decades.
Bernie Madoff, sentenced to 150 years in prison in June 2009, saw his family’s assets frozen, and his many multimillion-dollar properties and luxury possessions auctioned off. The family lost its Upper East Side condo, worth $7.5 million, a landscaped Montauk “cottage” on Long Island, and their own Palm Beach estate.
Ruth and Bernie’s personal items were sold by federal authorities at an auction that fetched about $1 million — which went into a fund for the mega-crook’s victims.
Authorities allowed Ruth to keep $2.5 million — a princely sum for most, but once pocket change for her.
She lives without frills, says an acquaintance, but she’s still got enough cash to finance a work-free snowbird lifestyle — she travels between Manhattan and Florida regularly, with frequent pit stops in North Carolina to visit her jailbird hubby.
There’s a cap on how much she can spend on herself: Ruth has to keep receipts for every personal expense, and submit monthly reports for any purchase over $100 to a bankruptcy judge.
During one of her prison visits, Ruth told her husband she was going to do charity work and try to start a new life, inmates at the medium-security prison in Butner, NC, told The Post last month.