bloomberg.com | 10/26/09 | suspect: Jeffry Picower
Jeffrey Picower, the philanthropist alleged to have withdrawn more than $7.2 billion from Bermard Madoff''s investment company, was found dead yesterday at his mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, according to police. He was 67.
Picower’s wife, Barbara, told dispatchers she found him “at the bottom of their swimming pool” at their oceanfront estate shortly after noon, Palm Beach police said. He was taken to Good Samaritan Hospital, where he was pronounced dead about 80 minutes later. Police are investigating the cause of death.
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, saying they withdrew more than $7.2 billion over 20 years, including upward of $5 billion in fake profits.
Picower, the Palm Beach-based foundation and 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, according to Picard’s complaint. Picower 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.”
Zabel, in a court filing, said Picower was a victim of Madoff’s fraud rather than a beneficiary, as Picard claimed in his civil complaint in bankruptcy court in New York.
“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,” Zabel said in the July 31 filing seeking dismissal of Picard’s so-called clawback complaint.
The Picower Foundation, run by Barbara Picower, gave away $163.9 million from 2002 to 2008, according to the July 31 filing in response to the Picard lawsuit.
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 Tonewaga.
The Zabel filing described Picower as a “highly successful businessman and private investor who also is an inactive certified public accountant and retired attorney.”
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