Bernie Madoff suffered a broken nose, fractured ribs, and cuts on his face in a prison beating in December, a fellow prisoner tells the Wall Street Journal. One prison source said the assailant thought Madoff owed him money, and another said the assailant was a muscular man serving time for a drug conviction. Though Madoff reportedly told staff he was not assaulted, he was transferred to the prison's medical center for treatment on Dec. 18; the Bureau of Prisons said he was experiencing dizziness and hypertension.
In other details of Madoff's life in prison, the financier apparently enjoys socializing with convicted mob boss Carmine Persico and a pharmacist who illegally distributed five million painkiller tablets, and he reportedly gets some respect from fellow inmates for the massive scale of his fraud.
(More Bernard Madoff stories.)