The most hated con man in New York will be trapped in a gilded cage until he goes to trial.
Fallen financier Bernard Madoff Friday was ordered confined to his $7 million upper East Side penthouse 24 hours a day by a Manhattan federal judge.
Madoff was already wearing an electronic ankle bracelet and required to be home from 7 p.m. to 9 a.m.
Magistrate Judge Theodore Katz agreed to tighten Madoff's bail conditions after federal prosecutors - worried about death threats and determined that he stand trial for engineering a $50 billion Ponzi scheme - cited the need to prevent "harm or flight."
Both Madoff and his wife, Ruth, have to surrender their passports and also will be surrounded by "additional guards," Assistant U.S. Attorney Marc Litt wrote.
Video monitors will be trained on the doors to the Madoff pad, and his "communications devices" will be fixed so they "send a direct signal from an observation post" to the FBI.
Finally, Madoff's wife, Ruth, will pick up the tab for "a security firm acceptable to the government," Litt wrote.
That still wasn't good enough for Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Brooklyn, Queens), who said, "Madoff should not be free on bail."
"If there was ever an example of someone who was a flight risk, someone who might have $20 million in a shoebox under his bed, that's Bernard Madoff," he said.
"We're concerned for the health and well-being of our high-profile clients," said Ira Sorkin, Madoff's lawyer.
Madoff, 70, was arrested last week. His assets were frozen, and he was ordered to come up with a list of all the people he had ripped off.
That list includes a "Who's Who" of Jewish philanthropists who have donated millions to charitable causes of all kinds in the U.S.
Nevertheless, Madoff's bust has stoked the anti-Semites, and the Web has been deluged with the braying of bigots about "the greed and corruption of the Jews," the Anti-Defamation League reported Friday.
"Jews are always a convenient scapegoat in times of crisis, but the Madoff scandal and the fact that so many of the defrauded investors are Jewish has created a perfect storm for the anti-Semites," said the league's Abe Foxman.
The "Jew-haters" aren't just spreading slander on the neo-Nazi or white-supremacist sites.
Forbes magazine's site was hit with e-mails from bigots who falsely claimed Madoff was funneling stolen money to Israel and passing "the losses on the U.S. investors."
The Securities and Exchange Commission was "filled with Jewish gatekeepers who routinely turn a blind eye to jewish [sic] financial bandits," a crackpot wrote on a Florida newspaper site.
The SEC, headed by a Catholic named Christopher Cox, has admitted it blew several chances over a decade to uncover what may be the biggest financial fraud ever.
csiemaszko@nydailynews.com
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
