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SCOUNDREL HIJACKED MY HOPES FOR A BETTER LIFE

IT’S easy to express in dollars what I lost to Bernard Madoff.

I invested $2 million — my life’s savings — at the end of 2001 with him, and now it’s all gone.

That amount includes the $300,000 I had redeemed to pay my income taxes through the years on the phantom profits I earned through his phony investments.

But I also have lost a big part of me. I think part of me died that day I learned of the fraud, along with so many hopes and dreams for the future.

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The true way to measure my loss is to look at what the fraud and the government’s negligence in failing to stop him have done to my life.

I may lose my house in Rockland County.

My dream of giving my 18-month-old adopted son a better childhood than I had was stolen from me. And my plans to adopt another child, so that my son wouldn’t be an only child, as I was, have gone up in smoke. The stress may be worsening my Parkinson’s disease.

And I no longer have the comfort and security of knowing I had money to fall back on. I found it devastating when that was taken away from me in just a second.

I have lost faith in a government that I once believed in.

It blows my mind to think that the Securities and Exchange Commission could have stopped Madoff’s fraud years ago, when the agency was explicitly warned, before I even contemplated putting my money in. I find it hard to believe.

I want Madoff to suffer, along with anyone who helped him. But what I really want more than anything, though, is for the SEC to acknowledge its negligence and its failure to protect me and the other victims.

And I want the SEC to help us to get our lives back financially.

I think the sentence Madoff received yesterday was appropriate. But whether he got 12 years or 150 years, either way it doesn’t help me pay my bills.

The sentence is only a small part of this story. The most important thing is to get restitution to his victims, but I am glad that he never will see freedom again.

I was disappointed that he appeared in court wearing what is no doubt a $1,000 suit. I would have gotten a little pleasure seeing him in an orange jailhouse jumpsuit.