Bernard Madoff will not attend son's funeral: lawyer

Police gather outside Mark Madoff's apartment where he was found dead in New York, December 11, 2010.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Convicted swindler Bernard Madoff will conduct a private service in prison in memory of his son, Mark, who committed suicide on Saturday, Madoff's lawyer Ira Lee Sorkin said on Monday.

"Mr. Madoff will not be attending the funeral out of consideration for his daughter-in-law's and grandchildren's privacy," Sorkin said. "He will be conducting a private service on his own where he is presently incarcerated."

Mark Madoff, 46, hanged himself inside his Manhattan apartment with a dog's leash on December 11, the second anniversary of his father's arrest on charges of orchestrating the biggest financial fraud in history.

Authorities said in December 2008 that Madoff confessed to his sons, Mark and Andrew, who then alerted authorities. The brothers were managers of the brokerage at Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC.

In a series of civil lawsuits, a trustee appointed to recover investors' money, sued Madoff's wife, Ruth, two sons, brother Peter and niece Shana for more than $244 million claiming they knew or should have known about the fraud.

Mark Madoff "succumbed to two years of unrelenting pressure from false accusations and innuendo," his lawyer, Martin Flumenbaum, said on Saturday.

A spokeswoman for the lawyer declined comment on Monday on any funeral arrangements.

A Federal Bureau of Prisons does allow furloughs for prisoners to attend funerals. A spokeswoman at the Butner, North Carolina, prison where Madoff, 72, is serving a 150-year sentence, said such information would not be made public.

U.S. prosecutors initially estimated the fraud took in about $65 billion. In some of his most recent lawsuits, the court-appointed trustee, Irving Picard, has put the amount of investor money lost at about $20 billion.

(Reporting by Grant McCool; editing by Andre Grenon)