Bernard Madoff has died at the age of 82, according to US newswire Associated Press.
He was behind one of the biggest investment fraud schemes in history, defrauding as many as 37,000 people in 136 countries for as much as $65bn (£47.1bn, €54.3bn).
Victims included director Steven Spielberg, actor Kevin Bacon and former New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon.
Madoff pleaded guilty in 2009 to a scheme that investigators said started in the early 1970s, however he insisted the fraud did not begin until the early 1990s, when, he said, “the market stalled due to the onset of the recession and the Gulf War”.
He was serving a 150-year sentence at the federal prison care centre in North Carolina, where he was being treated for terminal kidney failure.
