Madoff Cancer-Free: Media Swindled by Jailhouse Informants

This time it seems like Bernie Madoff had nothing to do with the scam. His jail buddies, though, fooled the New York Post, whose morning edition had the jailed money man dying of pancreatic cancer, based only on anonymous quotes from his fellow prisoners. After a day of speculation about his health (including rabid media proliferation without corroboration), Federal Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman Traci Billingsley has released a statement about the Post‘s report:

“While the N.Y. Post story is full of inaccuracies, and we can’t specifically address all of them, we can tell you that Bernie Madoff is not terminally ill, and has not been diagnosed with cancer.”

For all of the anonymous internet vitriol aimed Madoff after he was sentenced to 150 years in prison, a few in the peanut gallery took a clever, if counter-intuitive, view of justice. “Let’s hope he lives to be very old,” read one New York Times comment, wishing for the the disgraced financier to be behind bars for many years. But for the more vengeful set, today’s

news claiming that he was dying of pancreatic cancer might have seemed like a lightning bolt straight from the hand of Zeus to the North Carolina prison where Madoff currently resides. As it turns out, the Post got played.

Madoff’s camp has been mum on claims about the 71-year-old’s health since rumors of cancer crept into Page Six back in January, leaving the Post to rely solely on anonymous inmate sources. His fellow inmates claimed that Madoff is “taking about 20 pills a day for his cancer” and “talks about it all the time,” but for all of the media attention the story has received, its sources seemed far from savory.

The NY Post article features nary an oncologist, lawyer or family member, but quotes anonymously from “jailbirds” voicing their expert medical opinion that Madoff is “not doing very well.” The Wall Street Journal‘s Law Blog claimed to have confirmed the story “with sources familiar with the situation,” but stopped short of naming the type of cancer. The salacious detail provided to the Post from Madoff’s unnamed prison buddies was certainly nothing new ethically for the tabloid, but circulation of the story without skepticism from news organizations arguably higher on the journalistic integrity totem lead us to wonder again about the August news doldrums.

A Reuters report called the sources “unofficial and unusual,” but more prison yard anecdotes

buried deeper in the piece added to the dubious nature of it all. Sources in the piece go on to claim that Madoff has been participating shirtless in Native American “sweat lodges” (that includes “smoking from a ceremonial pipe”) and cavorting with the “homosexual posse.”

To hear the inmates tell it, despite the dubious cancer, it’s all starting to sound a little bit too much like the late-great Fox sit-com Arrested Development, in which jailed CEO George Bluth Sr. enjoys a religious awakening, ice-cream sandwiches and games of softball behind bars. Bluth’s prison activities eventually lead him out of jail and into house arrest. Earlier we wondered if growing sympathy for Madoff’s supposed suffering would eventually result in a similar end. Now, it just seems like Madoff’s jailbird friends might have learned a trick or two from the shyster himself.