Covering Jeffry Picower, Who Made Billions From Madoff Scheme

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 [1] on Sunday. As ProPublica’s Jake Bernstein reported in June, Picower netted more from the scheme than Madoff himself did [2]: upwards of $7.2 billion [3], 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 [2]" returns. (Here’s our chart of Picower’s withdrawals [4].) The trustee’s suit [5] contends that Picower knew or should have known that he was profiting from a fraud. A lawyer for Picower has called those allegations "baseless [6]."