There was a burst of applause in a Manhattan courtroom today when federal Judge Denny Chin gave financial swindler Bernard Madoff the maximum term of 150 years in prison. For a 71-year-old man, even the minimum would have been a life sentence. Judge Chin said he was sending some messages. One of Madoff's victims, Burt Ross, told reporters he lost $5 million and cited Dante's Inferno, which assigns violators of trust to the lowest depths of hell. Diana Henriques is senior financial writer for the New York Times.
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