Madoff transferred to N Carolina jail

The 71-year-old Wall Street swindler Bernie Madoff, who robbed investors of $65bn, was transferred on Monday to the jail where he will spend the rest of his life. Sentenced a fortnight ago in Manhattan to 150 years' jail, he has been sent to the Butner federal correctional centre in North Carolina, where he will join Omar Abdel-Rahman, the 'Blind Sheik behind the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing, and 4,800 other inmates.

His wife Ruth Madoff, who has been visiting him regularly in the remand centre in Manhattan where was held until yesterday, will have to travel 400 miles to see him, though visits will be limited.

Like other inmates' wives and girlfriend, she will be searched for drugs before meeting him, and embracing will be allowed only at the beginning and end of visits.

Madoff was sent away on the same day that another high-profile fraudster, Marc Dreier, was sentenced for cheating hedge funds and other investors of $700m by selling them fake promissory notes.

Dreir, 59, a prominent New York lawyer, got off lightly by comparison: prosecutors asked for 145 years, but Judge Jed Rakoff decided 20 years was enough, saying: "Mr Dreier is not going to get much sympathy from this court - but he is not Mr Madoff from any analysis."

Like Madoff, Dreier used a classic Ponzi scheme, taking some of the proceeds of his sales of fake notes to pay earlier investors.

Again like Madoff, Dreir used his ill-gotten gains to finance an extravagant lifestyle. Prosecutors presented photographs of a luxury apartment on the Upper East Side, a beach-front home in the Hamptons, an $18m yacht, expensive cars including a $200,000 Aston Martin DB-9 convertible and a valuable art collection.

"Dreier committed this crime in order to elevate his stature to that of the rich and famous, thereby avoiding the 'mediocrity' of merely running his own law firm and earning 'only' hundreds of thousands per year," prosecutors argued. ·