Irving Picard, the trustee in charge of returning the money lost to Bernie Madoff's ponzi scheme, is getting ready to write a whole lotta checks. A judge has given his approval for Picard's request to make his first payments to Madoff customers with approved claims. He'll be cutting 1,224 checks this quarter, worth an average of $222,551, from a fund of $2.6 billion dollars. The news comes two-and-a-half years after Madoff's monumental scheme was revealed.
And the money going out isn't even close to all of the money that Picard has collected. So far he's brought in $7.6 billion of the estimated $20 billion in principal lost ($17.3 billion of which has been "deemed eligible for distributions"). But much of that money is tied up in appeals and other disputes regarding who deserves the money and how much. This case is going to go on for a long time, just ask the Wilpons.
