re: #16 lawhawk

The victims of the Ponzi scheme will take cold comfort from the maximum sentence handed down. A judge required that Madoff’s assets be seized, including the multimillion dollar homes in NY and Florida, and expect them to be sold to provide some redress for the victims.

I doubt whether this will be a sufficient deterrent from other scam artists trying to pull a similar stunt. It also showed the problems with regulatory officials who couldn’t unravel the scheme and refused to listen to whistleblowers who wondered how someone could claim double digit returns for years on end, even in volatile and down market years.

Scam artists all have two things in common:
1) they think they are smarter than everyone else
2) they think they will never get caught

Questions:
Why would someone sentence a 71 yr old man to prison for 150 years?
What does that 150 yrs translate into in regards to parole eligibility?