The yacht goes first. Then the jet, then the art, then the house with the helipad, and by the time the receivers have finished there is a court file where a fortune used to be. The 26 people here were all, at one point, verifiably rich beyond counting: seventh in the world, richest in Ireland, richest in Asia. What links them is not bad luck but a mechanism. Some ran Ponzi schemes and outright frauds that were always going to end in a courtroom. Some borrowed heavily and made one enormous bet that went the wrong way inside 48 hours. Some built empires on debt nobody would refinance. Two watched divorce settlements evaporate. And two are still standing, rebuilt or restructured, which is rarer than it sounds. Every conviction, sentence, bankruptcy and seizure below comes from court records, regulator filings or bankruptcy petitions, with the date it was decided.
Bernie Madoff and the Yacht Named Bull
There was a 55 foot Rybovich sportfisherman in Palm Beach called Bull, a beach house in Montauk, a duplex penthouse on East 64th Street, a place on the French Riviera at Cap d’Antibes, and a client list that ran from Hollywood names to university endowments. In March 2009 Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 federal counts and admitted running a Ponzi scheme whose fabricated statements showed about $65 billion. In June 2009 Judge Denny Chin sentenced him to 150 years. The US Marshals Service auctioned the fleet. Bull sold for $700,000 and the boat sale raised roughly $2 million for a victims fund. The Montauk house went for $9.4 million in September 2009. Madoff died at the federal medical centre in Butner, North Carolina, on 14 April 2021, aged 82.