Our Coverage of Jeffry Picower, Who Made Billions From Madoff Scheme

Oct. 26, 2009, 11:34 a.m. EDT

The Picowers' portrait at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory (Photo by Ryan Mark) Jeffry Picower, the 67-year-old businessman and philanthropist who reaped billions from Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, was found dead in his pool on Sunday. As ProPublica’s Jake Bernstein reported in June, Picower netted more from the scheme than Madoff himself did: upwards of $7.2 billion, according to a lawsuit filed by the trustee liquidating Madoff’s firm.

Picower regularly withdrew large chunks of cash from his accounts with Madoff, which as we put it, earned "otherworldly" returns. (Here’s our chart of Picower’s withdrawals.) The trustee’s suit contends that Picower knew or should have known that he was profiting from a fraud. A lawyer for Picower has called those allegations "baseless."

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