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Before he was sentenced, Madoff heard denunciations from nine of the investors he swindled and made a statement of his own. Judge Denny Chin called Madoff's fraud "extraordinarily evil" imposing the maximum legal sentence. To CNBC's Scott Cohn, reporting on NBC, Madoff seemed "thin and emotionally emotionless, slumped deeper and deeper in his chair." On CBS, Armen Keteyian called him "devoid of emotion." ABC's Brian Ross had a different takeaway: "I saw no tears in his eyes and it seemed to me there was a distinct smirk on his face."
Madoff's wife Ruth was not in the courtroom. CBS' Jeff Glor quoted her denunciation of her husband: "Like everyone else I feel betrayed and confused. The man who committed this horrible fraud is not the man whom I have known for all these years." Glor commented that she recently handed $80m over to the feds "with the hope of avoiding prosecution." ABC's Ross listed Mrs Madoff as one of the "inner circle" that is still under investigation. Besides Madoff's wife, there is his brother Peter, his sons Andrew and Mark, his accountant David Fiehling and two associates, Annette Bongiorno and Frank diPascali.
ABC's Ross quoted Madoff to his investors: "I am sorry. I know that does not help." Then ABC ran a 1st Person soundbite from Burt Ross, one of those investors: "It is hard to imagine that somebody who could do this for decades in a calculating, premeditated way would all of a sudden have remorse." Judge Chin, ABC's Ross noted, "had not received a single letter on Madoff's behalf from family or friends."
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