Ponzi Saga Continues With Mark Madoff's Suicide - Forbes (blog)

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Mark Madoff's suicide on the two-year anniversary of his notification to law enforcement that his father, Bernard Madoff, was a crook, is the latest reminder that the Madoff saga is nowhere near reaching its conclusion.

The drama of the biggest Ponzi scheme in history will continue long past the second-anniversary of its exposure.

For Bernard Madoff's eldest son, it appears that two years of living with the public humiliation of his father's massive crime and the potential for personally facing criminal prosecution was clearly too much. Mark Madoff hung himself in his upscale Manhattan apartment with a black dog leash and discovered Saturday morning by his father-in-law. The Associated Press reported that Mark Madoff's two-year-old son was sleeping in the next bedroom.

As recently as this morning's paper, the Wall Street Journal had reported that federal prosecutors were focusing hard on Madoff's sons. The Journal also reported this morning that Mark Madoff had unsuccessfully tried at one point to get a job in trading and had most recently been working to develop new applications for iPads. Mark Madoff, who always denied knowing about the fraud even though he worked for his dad's investment firm, was bitter about his father's crime and had not spoken to him in two years, the Journal reported. His wife, Stephanie, had felt compelled to change her last name from Madoff to Morgan.

Just this past week, Irving Picard, the court-appointed trustee for Bernard Madoff's investment firm, filed a lawsuit against the children of both Mark and his brother, Andrew.

The past two weeks have seen plenty of big developments in the Madoff saga, showing that dealing with aftermath of the biggest financial crime in history can take years.

Picard, who is trying to recover funds for some of Madoff's victims, launched a barrage of lawsuits against banks and Madoff associates in an effort to beat a deadline that comes into effect on Saturday. On Friday, Picard filed the biggest lawsuit of his two-year effort, suing Austrian banker Sonja Kohn and Italy's biggest bank, UniCredit, seeking $19.6 billion in damages.