Forbes – Bernie Madoff hated e-mail. He rarely used it at his high-tech Wall Street trading firm. When others did, he fretted about the trail it left behind. He wasn’t crazy about letters, either. A staffer had standing orders to destroy his correspondence with one important client. Even after December 2008, when the world learned that Madoff had run the largest Ponzi scheme in history, few personal letters surfaced. He always preferred to deal with people face-to-face.
But early in his 150-year prison sentence that all changed. His wife, Ruth, stopped visiting. His estranged older son, Mark, committed suicide; his surviving son, Andrew, never visited and swore he never would. His encounters with the world beyond the prison’s razor-wire perimeter shrank down to occasional meetings with lawyers.