Ruth Madoff Visits Bernie In The Clink

Photograph of Ruth Madoff leaving the Metropolitan Correctional Center (with bodyguards) by Mary Altaffer/AP

The Daily News has an account of the scene outside the lock-up: "Ruth Madoff dropped in to the lockup for a tete-á-tete with her beloved Bernie on Monday, emerging as silent as the Sphinx about her first visit behind bars.... [She] looked calm and relaxed and even let slip a fleeting smile at the swarm of journalists buzzing around her. Still, as questions such as 'Was he contrite?' and 'Are you going to turn your money over to the feds?' flew at her, Ruth played deaf."

However, accusations and insinuations that Ruth Madoff was intimately involved with her husband's Ponzi scheme continue to roll in. Yesterday, Lucinda Franks wrote in The Daily Beast that a Palm Beach socialite told her, "Everyone down here thinks she was involved in the Ponzi scheme" before launching into a story of how Ruth lined up an investor for Madoff. In the April Vanity Fair, it was implied that Ruth is smarter than her husband: "While Bernie spent his freshman year at the University of Alabama—at that time, some say, an easier entrance portal for students who couldn’t get accepted into eastern colleges—Ruth passed the entrance requirements for Queens College."

Franks told the CBS Early Show that while one of Madoff's victims includes his own sister, "I don't think Ruth's worries are about money right now. Her husband salted away money all over the world in her name, and this is what investigators are trying to get back now." One less salt mine: Madoff's $7 million yacht was seized by French authorities (this is a different boat from the two seized in Florida).