Is cancer claim Madoff’s first step to freedom?

Now serving 150 years in a North Carolina jail for swindling thousands of investors out of more than $65 billion, Bernie Madoff has been telling his fellow inmates that he is dying of cancer.

A prisoner quoted by the New York Post said: "He's been taking about 20 pills a day for his cancer. He talks about it all the time. He's not doing very well."

The revelation - if it is true - would tend to support the theory that Madoff took the fall for the investment scam all on his own because he had nothing to lose. Also, rumours surfaced earlier this year about him suffering from pancreatic cancer.

Whether Madoff is hoping to use his sickness to argue for early release is unlikely so soon after commencing his jail term. In recent weeks, high-profile prisoners who have "pulled an Ernest Saunders" - see below - include great train robber Ronnie Biggs who was granted his freedom earlier this month by justice secretary Jack Straw because he was close to death, and, of course, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber with terminal prostate cancer, sent home to Libya last week by Scottish justice minister Kenny MacAskill.

Intriguingly, Biggs looked an awful lot better the very next day, while Megrahi now says he plans to write a book about the Lockerbie bombing, even though he has only three months to live.

The most infamous jailbird to produce a doctor's sicknote in recent years was Ernest Saunders, the former Guinness chief executive jailed for fraud in 1990. Saunders was freed after serving only 10 months of a two-and-a-half year sentence when a judge was persuaded he was suffering from incurable Alzheimer's disease.

Saunders's symptoms miraculously cleared and he became a business consultant. ·