Bernie’s looking for a break.
Mega-fraudster Bernard Madoff has hired a leading prison consultant to help him try to weasel out of a maximum 150-year term for his $65 billion Ponzi scheme.
“Mitigation specialist” Herbert Hoelter — who’s helped celebrity jailbirds such as Martha Stewart and Michael Vick — got court permission to visit Madoff in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, where Bernie is awaiting sentencing on June 29.
Hoelter’s Baltimore-based firm, the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives — which has worked with Stewart and Vick — specializes in “sentencing advocacy,” including “arguments for downward departure from the sentencing guidelines.”
Meanwhile, a Masonic lodge in Philadelphia yesterday sued its investment adviser for plowing $13 million into a Madoff feeder fund, Bloomberg News reported.