Bernard Madoff, the Wall Street financier who orchestrated one of the biggest frauds in US financial history died in a prison hospital Wednesday, the Federal Bureau of Prisons reported. He was 82.

He served nearly 12 years of a 150-year sentence after pleading guilty to running a Ponzi scheme in 2009. The scheme paid investors with money from new clients than actual profits, according to BBC.

Madoff maneuvered his scheme through a severe recession in 1990s, a global financial crisis in 1998 and the terrorist attack in 2001. His company Bernard L Madoff Investment Securities was investigated eight times by the US Securities and Exchange Commission for generating huge returns.

But he could not evade the mortgage market meltdown in 2008. He realized it was “one big lie” when he could not return millions of dollars to people withdrawing money from their Madoff accounts.  

The casualties ranged from high profile clients, charities and foreign banks to school teachers and farmers. The losses piled up to nearly $65 billion. But it wasn’t only money that was lost.

Three people including his son Mark Madoff were reported to have died by suicide. His younger son Andrew blamed the trauma of his father’s scandal for the relapse of his cancer that killed him in 2014. His brother and chief compliance officer at the company Peter Madoff pleaded guilty to federal tax and securities fraud charges and later forfeited his personal property to compensate victims. Peter was sentenced to a 10-year prison term.