Madoff visits Ga. on way to life behind bars

By Jeffry Scott

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

For one night Bernard Madoff was among us.

Sort of.

By Tuesday morning he was gone.

Madoff was shipped out of town by the Federal Bureau of Prisons as unceremoniously as he had arrived Monday evening to stay overnight at the U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta.

As one of America’s most infamous criminals — he pleaded guilty to bilking thousands of investors out of billions of dollars — it looked for a time like Madoff, sentenced to 150 years, would serve a bit of poetic justice in Atlanta, too.

Madoff (inmate No. 61727-0540) stole billions in a so-called "ponzi" scheme, where he paid off early investors with money collected from new clients.

The man that scheme was named after, Charles Ponzi (inmate No. 1602), served time for his crimes in Atlanta pen back in the 1920s. Chicago gangster Al Capone (inmate No. 40886) is another public enemy who bunked in the Atlanta pen.

Shortly after lunch Tuesday Madoff, 71, arrived at the Butner Federal Correction Complex in Butner, N.C., 15 miles northeast of Durham, where he’ll spend the rest of his life in an inmate population with a few other figures of high and shifty finance.

There’s John Rigas, the founder of Adelphia Communications, who was convicted in 2004 of securities fraud, and Al Parish, a former economist at Charleston Southern University who pleaded guilty in 2007 to running his own a ponzi scheme.

But both their schemes, relatively speaking, stole chump change — mere millions of dollars — compared to Madoff’s elaborate and decade’s long scam that prosecutors said defrauded investors out of a staggering $65 billion.