Madoff gets 150 years for massive investment fraud

By Grant McCool and Martha Graybow

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Bernard Madoff was sentenced on Monday to 150 years in prison -- the maximum penalty the judge could give him for "extraordinarily evil" crimes in Wall Street's biggest and most brazen investment fraud.

Fleeced investors in the courtroom cheered and applauded as the judge handed down the penalty.

Madoff, 71, stood passively with his hands clasped at his waist, showing no reaction when he heard the sentence that will send him to prison for the rest of his life.

The former nonexecutive chairman of the Nasdaq stock market has been jailed in a Manhattan cell since he pleaded guilty to 11 charges including securities fraud, money laundering and perjury in March.

"Here the message must be sent that Mr. Madoff's crimes were extraordinarily evil," U.S. District Judge Denny Chin said in rejecting defense pleas for a lenient, 12-year sentence. "The breach of trust was massive.

"I simply do not get the sense that Mr. Madoff has done all that he could or told all that he knows."

The gray-haired money manager was dressed in his signature dark gray suit, white shirt and tie instead of a prison jumpsuit.

The disgraced financier sat passively throughout the hour-and-a-half hearing as his victims called him a "beast," an "animal" and a "lowlife."

He apologized to them, at one point turning toward the 250 people in the courtroom.

"I will live with this pain, with this torment, for the rest of my life," he calmly said. "I live in a tormented state knowing the pain and suffering I have created."

Madoff, who has been accused of bilking investors worldwide out of as much as $65 billion, said, "In my business, when you make a trading error, you're expected to make a trading error, it's accepted. My error was much more serious. I made an error of judgment."

CAUGHT OUT BY FINANCIAL CRISIS

Madoff's December arrest came as investors were feeling the brunt of the worst financial crisis since the 1930s Great Depression.

The case has triggered widespread criticism of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which has been accused of missing red flags that could have brought the curtain down on his asset management business.

It was not known where Madoff will serve his sentence for what prosecutors described as a worldwide fraud of small and wealthy investors, charities and financial institutions.