Fellow Jailbirds Looking to Pluck Madoff Up

Swindler has gone from caviar and brie to fillet-o-fish and mac and cheese.

Bernard Madoff has gone from Ponzi to con(zi) and he may find that life in the big house is not all its shanked up to be.

Fellow inmates at the Butner, N.C., federal lock-up have their sights on Madoff and are looking to rough him up to earn some cool points, according to the New York Post.

"Some of the guys were talking about smacking him around a little, just to get the notoriety of it," a source, who has a relative in the clink with Madoff, told the Post.

Madoff could be most threatened by other white-collar crime inmates, who may have some connection to the more than 1,000 people he defrauded out of upwards of $65 billion over the course of 20 years.

But the 71-year-old also has some fans behind bars, said the Post's source, thanks to the fact that he didn't snitch.

"He's got a lot of respect from other inmates because he didn't tell on anybody, he didn't take everybody down with him," the source told the paper.

Madoff has even gotten an honest job (finally) in the prison's engraving section -- making desk and door nameplates for seven and a half hours a day, and joins his fellow inmates in "the yard" for recreation. Last week he was hanging out with the other jailbirds watching a game of dominoes.

His eating habits have also become more pedestrian than the haute cuisine he may have gotten used to as a Wall Street big shot -- last Thursday, Madoff dined on fish fillet with a side of macaroni and cheese.

The Post's source called Madoff a"regular dude," and a really good guy" who "holds his head up," but said the fallen financier did show some emotion when talking about his wife.

"He said that his wife was mad at him because the paparazzi won't leave her alone," the source said, adding that Madoff's eyes welled up with tears as he spoke.

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