Jeffry Picower, Madoff Investor, Found Dead at Home

Jeffry Picower, Madoff Investor, Found Dead at Home

Oct. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Jeffry Picower, the philanthropist alleged to have withdrawn more than $7.2 billion from Bernard Madoff’s investment company, was found dead today at his home in Palm Beach, Florida, according to police. He was 67.

Picower’s wife Barbara told dispatchers at 12:09 local time that she had “just found her husband at the bottom of their swimming pool” at their residence at 1410 South Ocean Blvd., police said. He was taken to Good Samaritan Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 1:30, the police said.

“As standard operating procedure in any drowning, the Palm Beach Police Department is conducting an investigation into Mr. Picower’s death,” police said in a statement.

Picower’s attorney, William Zabel, didn’t immediately respond to a call and e-mail seeking comment.

Picower benefited more from Madoff’s $65 billion Ponzi scheme than any other investor, according to Irving Picard, the lawyer liquidating Madoff’s investment business. Picard sued Picower, his foundation and related entities, claiming they withdrew more than $7.2 billion over 20 years, including more than $5 billion in fake profits.

Picower said he was a victim of Madoff’s fraud rather than a beneficiary, as Picard claimed in his civil complaint in bankruptcy court in New York.

Huge Returns

“Rather than recognizing Mr. Picower and the other defendants as victims of Madoff’s fraud, the trustee instead casts them as villains in history’s largest Ponzi scheme,” Picower said in a court filing July 31 seeking dismissal of Picard’s complaint.

The complaint claims Picower, his Palm Beach-based foundation, and several related defendants should have known that the annual returns they were getting from Madoff -- including some allegedly as high as 950 percent -- were the result of fraud. Picower had said those figures are wrong.

Picard said that Picower received more than $2.4 billion from the fraud during the past six years alone, and that his accounts “were riddled with blatant and obvious fraud.”

Madoff, 71, pleaded guilty in March and was sentenced on June 29 to 150 years in prison for using money from new clients to pay earlier investors. Picard is suing Madoff’s biggest investors and beneficiaries, including offshore hedge funds.

Among the institutions that benefited from Picower’s giving were the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which used a $50 million donation from Picower in 2002 to fund a brain-research center under Nobel prize-winner Susumu Tonegawa.

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