Swindler, Ponzi Scheme | featured news

A prominent futures-industry executive, Russell Wasendorf Sr., was sentenced to 50 years in prison on Thursday for embezzling from his clients and defrauding banks over nearly two decades.

The son of the disgraced chief of Peregrine Financial said he has been personally and financially devastated by his father's fraud, which brought down the firm and left investors facing tens of millions of dollars in losses.

The star prosecution witness in the trial of convicted Texas financier R. Allen Stanford was sentenced Tuesday to five years in prison for helping to bilk investors out of more than $7 billion in one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in U.S. history.

Timothy S. Durham, the onetime chief executive officer of National Lampoon (NLMP) Inc., was sentenced to 50 years in prison for defrauding investors in an unrelated company he partly controlled. “I found no sincere remorse,” U.S. District Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson in Indianapolis said today before imposing punishment on Durham, 50. She said the former Fair Finance Co. CEO exhibited deceit, greed and arrogance.

Peter B. Madoff, who was arrested early Friday, pleaded guilty to criminal actions that enabled his brother, Bernard L. Madoff, to carry out the largest Ponzi scheme in history. While Peter Madoff, 66, acknowledged wrongdoing, he said in the hearing at the Federal District Court in Manhattan that he did not know of the fraud that wiped out about $65 billion in paper wealth.

Former jet-setting Texas tycoon R. Allen Stanford, whose financial empire once spanned the Americas, was sentenced Thursday to 110 years in prison for bilking investors out of more than $7 billion over 20 years in one of the largest Ponzi schemes in U.S. history.

Investors taken in by Texas tycoon R. Allen Stanford expressed relief and a sense of vindication after a federal jury convicted the jet-setting financier of swindling them out of more than $7 billion. But they said the verdict will never replace the loss of their life savings....

Bernard Madoff, convicted of swindling $65 billion through the biggest-ever Ponzi scheme, has told fellow prison inmates that he is dying of cancer, the New York Post reported on Monday, citing unnamed prison sources.