Bernie Madoff’s devastating Ponzi scheme claimed another life Wednesday with the death of his younger son, Andrew — who last year blamed his cancer relapse on stress and shame from his dad’s epic fraud.
Andrew, whose older brother, Mark, hanged himself in 2010, died of mantle-cell lymphoma at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, according to a statement by his lawyer, Martin Flumenbaum. He was 48.
Flumenbaum said Andrew went “peacefully” and was “surrounded by his loving family.”
That did not include Bernie, who’s serving 150 years in the slammer for the $65 million rip-off and was disowned by Andrew.
“Even on my deathbed, I will never forgive him for what he did,” Andrew told People magazine last year.
Andrew fought off the rare cancer in 2003, and he told People he was “blindsided” when an annual checkup in October 2012 revealed it had returned.
“One way to think of this is the scandal and everything that happened killed my brother very quickly. And it’s killing me slowly,” Andrew said at the time.
On the second anniversary of his father’s arrest, he hanged himself with a dog leash inside a Soho loft as their 2-year-old son slept in another room.
Mack wrote in her 2011 memoir, “The End of Normal,” that Mark was “engulfed” by torment over his dad’s crimes and that Mark wrote him a note during a previous attempt to kill himself.
“Bernie: Now you know how you have destroyed the lives of your sons by your life of deceit. F–k you,” the note said, according to Mack.
At least three other deaths have also been blamed on Madoff’s fraud, including suicides by two burned investors.
It was unclear if Bernie was aware of Andrew’s death.
An official at the federal prison in Butner, NC, where Madoff is locked up, said the chaplain there “typically notifies an inmate of a family death . . . and offers pastoral care” but wouldn’t discuss Madoff specifically.
After Mark’s suicide, Bernie opted not to attend the funeral “out of consideration for his daughter-in-law’s and grandchildren’s privacy.”
There was no sign of Andrew’s mom, Ruth Madoff, or his fiancée, Catherine Hooper, at the Old Greenwich, Conn., house they started sharing after Ruth relocated from Florida in 2011.
The Madoff brothers both worked at their father’s broker-dealer securities business, located in the famed “Lipstick Building” on the East Side, where Bernie also ran his crooked money-management firm.
They spurred their dad’s spectacular arrest by contacting the FBI after he confessed to them that his prominent stock-trading operation was “all one big lie” in December 2008.
Neither was charged in the record scheme, but in July, prosecutors identified them both as “co-conspirators” when accountant Paul Konigsberg pleaded guilty to helping Bernie commit his crimes, according to Reuters.
Irving Picard, the trustee in charge of liquidating Bernie’s business, has accused his kin of using it as their “personal piggy bank,” and is seeking $153 million from Andrew and Mark’s estate.
Additional reporting by Kevin Dugan