More letters from victims in the Bernard Madoff investment scandal were unsealed Friday.
Madoff will likely die in prison when he is sentenced in June after pleading guilty this month to a Ponzi scheme that ran a tab of somewhere in the neighborhood of $65 billion.
At the request of WNBC, letters to Hon. Denny Chin from some of Madoff's victims were unsealed last week. And below are samples of more heartbreak in the newer letters that were released on Friday:
+ "How dare Ruth Madoff hold onto $62 million and a penthouse with my money, while I go begging for food stamps."
+ "When am I going to get a second go-round to plan my financial future? I relied on the regulatory system for securities and banking when I invested my earnings. What more could I do than that? When an individual screws up, he pays, so why can't the government pay when they screw up?
+ "My wife and I are senior citizens who have lost virtually all of our retirement savings due to Bernard L. Madoff. And now, we are also being victimized by our own government, by the IRS, which is keeping all of the taxes that we paid on the 'phantom profits' Madoff reported year after year. We paid 'ordinary income tax' for over 20 years with our own money, and can only apply for a refund on the last 3 years' returns. It looks like the IRS is the only beneficiary of the Madoff Ponzi scheme."
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+ "I believed that by building up my account I would live off the income and have an estate to leave to my children and grandchildren. That is all gone now! My children had an insurance policy to help them pay taxes on my estate. They have had to cash that in to give me the money to live on until I receive SPIC and IRS dollars."
+ "We are people of modest means and living ethics. This money was being used to provide our children with the college education that they have worked so hard to deserve, and to provide us with savings for a secure retirement. Our daughter was in the middle of final exams when this took place and was looking forward to returning home for winter break. Upon her return from college, we told her that she may not be able to continue to pursue her dreams of being an attorney."
