Investing.com -- Frank DiPascali a longtime confidant of disgraced financier Bernard Madoff passed away last week of lung cancer, his attorney said Monday.
DiPascali, 58, awaited sentencing in September on 10 felony federal criminal charges of which he plead guilty in August, 2009. The charges, which related to Madoff's ponzi scheme, carried up to 125 years in federal prison.
DiPascali, a native of Queens, New York, was charged with a slew of felonies, ranging from securities fraud, conspiracy and investment advisor fraud to wire fraud, perjury and international money laundering. The government, however, said DiPascali provided substantial assistance into the investigation and his sentence would have been significantly reduced.
DiPascali, worked for Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities for a period of 33 years from 1975 until 2008, spending time as the firm's Director of Options Trading, as well as its Chief Financial Officer.
"He was grateful to have been able to make some amends by helping the government these past few years," DiPascali's attorney Marc Mukasey said in a statement.
In 2009, Madoff, 77, was sentenced to 150 years in prison at FCC Butner, a medium-security facility in North Carolina. Before Madoff's arrest in December, 2008, it was believed he had struggled to make approximately $7 billion in payments to a wide range of clients. The size of Madoff's scheme, according to some estimates, reached as high as $65 billion.
In May, 2011, the bankruptcy trustee who oversaw all claims related to the case, said while $7.6 billion in losses had been recovered, only $2.6 billion was available to repay the victims of the scheme.
During an August, 2009 hearing, DiPascali detailed how he helped Madoff create the massive scheme, in part by creating fake account statements and transfers from the firm's offices in New York to London, to create the illusion that it had been earning commissions from trades.
"I knew it was criminal and I did it anyway," DiPascali told Federal District Court Judge Richard Sullivan, according to the New York Times.