‘Can’t say I’m shedding a tear’: Bernie Madoff’s victims react to his death

In the last years of his life, Ilene Kent’s father “just wasn’t the same” after he lost more than half of his net worth to Bernie Madoff’s notorious, $65 billion Ponzi scheme. 

“He didn’t laugh, he didn’t tell jokes … you could just tell something in him had changed,” Kent told The Post by phone Wednesday, recalling how Madoff robbed her father of the golden years he spent decades preparing for as a Long Island doctor. 

When she got news of the disgraced financier’s death Wednesday morning, she said it was a fate he was only too lucky to have gotten. 

“The fact that he suffered at the end is almost poetic justice for the suffering he inflicted,” the 67-year-old said. 

“I can’t say I’m shedding a tear.” 

Madoff leaves behind not just his widow, grandchildren and siblings — who will all be forever marred by his crimes — but tens of thousands of victims, many of whom had their livelihoods snatched away in the most prolific scam in Wall Street history. 

“I think he should’ve lived for another 500 years as a very sick man,” said Stephanie Halio, who lost “pretty close to a hundred percent” of her life savings to Madoff’s crooked hedge fund. 

“I’m sorry that he passed away and he’s out of it,” the 78-year-old continued. 

“He hurt so many people very, very badly. He was a horrible person, I wouldn’t even call him a human being, he was a horrible man for what he did and ruined so many lives.

“He was too lucky to die.” 

Halio said she and her late husband, Robert, were introduced to Madoff by a friend and were direct investors for “many, many years” until their gilded life came to a screeching halt in December 2008 when the New York-born schemer was busted for securities fraud by the FBI. 

“It came at such a total shock when it was revealed that he was such a crook,” Halio said. 

“We lost cars, we lost a vacation home, we lost a lot and our whole lifestyle was turned upside down and as senior citizens, we went back to work.” 

The couple, who were retired at the time after Halio’s husband made it big running a process-serving business he started from scratch, had to start over when they realized their savings had been gambled away by Madoff. They started a driving service and spent their golden years schlepping 50-pound suitcases and ferrying people around to the airport, to doctor’s appointments, “wherever people needed a ride.” 

Soon, Halio’s husband came down with Alzheimer’s disease and they were forced to end their second act early and get by on “whatever it was that we got back” from the Madoff victim compensation fund, which was only about 15 percent of what they lost. 

“I thought maybe that the shock gave him [Robert] this disease but there’s really no evidence for that, but it certainly was a double whammy, Madoff and then Alzheimer’s,” Halio said. 

“Again, I was sorry that [Madoff] passed away. I wanted him to live and suffer the way that he made so many other people suffer.” 

Judith Rock Goldman expected to have a nest egg just shy of half a million dollars when she retired — money she sorely needed to care for her husband when he too came down with Alzheimer’s disease right around the time Madoff’s house of cards came to a spectacular crash. 

Suddenly, the retired civilian worker for the US Navy was facing an unimaginable predicament. 

“The most horrifying thing for me was that I had to ask his children to help support him and I couldn’t pay,” Goldman, 78, told The Post.

“I have to tell you in life what a parent never wants to do is have to go to their children for money.” 

When she found out about Madoff’s crimes, Goldman said she felt like she’d “been raped.” 

“I felt totally out of control. Here’s my husband on the road to dying, now I’ve lost the extra money that I have to care for him,” Goldman, who lives in White Plains, recalled. 

“I am very happy that he’s gone now… I felt Madoff should have been killed but of course this country doesn’t do that,” she continued. 

“My first reaction was thank god.

“He didn’t suffer enough as far as I am concerned.”

Madoff’s longtime secretary of 25 years, Eleanor Ottaino, formerly Squillari, isn’t a victim in the sense that she lost money from her crooked boss’s dealings, but she did feel violated when she learned the comfortable life she’d built was predicated on a lie. 

“I was traumatized when it happened because it came out of left field and people I was friends with were involved and it was just mind blowing,” Ottaino, 70, said from her Boca Raton home where she’s since started a new life. 

“My life was very nice and I thought I had nice friends, I was not aware that these people were involved and it still blows my mind to this day because you always gotta say to yourself ‘what was that deciding factor?’

“People think of white collar crime as, you know, not a violent crime. No, it is a violent crime because people died from it, you had investors who killed themselves, his son killed himself, his other son’s cancer came back from the stress… a lot of people died because of him and we’re never going to know the ramifications for all of these people because there were thousands of them.” 

When asked how she felt about Madoff’s death, Ottaino didn’t mince words. 

“I don’t care,” she snapped. 

“What the man did was horrible. He did it to his own family besides to everyone else.” 

During Madoff’s June 2009 sentencing where he received 150 years behind bars, nine of his victims testified of the horrors his crimes wreaked on their families, relationships, legacies and livelihoods.  

Michael Schwartz, 33 at the time, told the court his family’s trust fund had been invested with Madoff since he was a teenager and a portion of it was set aside for his disabled twin brother. 

“Part of the trust fund wasn’t set aside for a house in the Hamptons, a large yacht or box seat to the Mets. No, part of that money was set aside to take care of my twin brother who is mentally disabled, who at 33, he lives at home with my parents and will need care and supervision for the rest of his life,” Schwartz testified. 

“In the final analysis, my family wants to remember that in addition to stealing from retirees, veterans, widows, Bernard Madoff stole from the disabled. Every time he cashed a check and paid for his family’s decadent lifestyle, he killed dreams.” 

While Madoff’s greed did in fact kill, not just figuratively, but literally, Schwartz’s final hope came true Wednesday when the fraudster died in federal prison. 

“Your Honor, I say this without any malice, Bernard Madoff should no longer be allowed back in society,” Schwartz said at the end of his testimony. 

“I only hope that his prison sentence is long enough so that his jail cell becomes his coffin.” 

Additional reporting by Jackie Salo