NEW YORK-In plead­ing guilty to crim­i­nal charges, Pe­ter Mad­off por­trayed him­self as a vic­tim of a dom­i­neer­ing old­er broth­er who he revered right up un­til an evening in De­cem­ber 2008 when his sib­ling re­vealed that his wild­ly suc­cess­ful in­vest­ment busi­ness was a sham that lost its cus­tomers a near­ly $20 bil­lion in­vest­ment.

"I was in to­tal shock," Mad­off said Fri­day as he de­scribed the con­fes­sion by his old­er broth­er, Bernard. "My world was de­stroyed. I lost every­thing I worked for." The 66-year-old Mad­off, who said he was "deeply ashamed and ter­ri­bly sor­ry," spoke an­gri­ly about his 74-year-old broth­er, who is serv­ing a 150-year prison term in the US af­ter ad­mit­ting his cre­ation of the largest known Ponzi scheme.

The younger Mad­off said his broth­er had made it clear that he would nev­er be­come a part­ner in the busi­ness where he had worked since 1966, even as he was show­ered with tens of mil­lions of dol­lars in salary, bonus­es and oth­er fi­nan­cial gifts. He made him the in­vest­ment busi­ness' chief com­pli­ance of­fi­cer.

Pe­ter Mad­off said he was so con­fi­dent about his broth­er's smarts and suc­cess that he per­suad­ed his wife, daugh­ter, grand­daugh­ter and sis­ter to in­vest mil­lions of dol­lars that they even­tu­al­ly lost in the fraud. He agreed to serve ten years in prison and sur­ren­der all his as­sets as he plead­ed guilty to con­spir­a­cy and fal­si­fy­ing records. He will re­main free on $5 mil­lion bail un­til his Oc­to­ber 4 sen­tenc­ing.

Fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors said the in­ves­ti­ga­tion was on­go­ing. Pros­e­cu­tors por­trayed the younger Mad­off as a crim­i­nal­ly in­com­pe­tent chief com­pli­ance of­fi­cer who filed fab­ri­cat­ed com­pli­ance re­ports for more than a decade and pur­pose­ful­ly de­ceived the Se­cu­ri­ties and Ex­change Com­mis­sion.

"He even signed many weeks of com­pli­ance re­ports in one sit­ting, in­ten­tion­al­ly chang­ing pens and ink colours to dis­guise the fact that he had done them at once," as­sis­tant US at­tor­ney Lisa Ba­roni told US Dis­trict Judge Lau­ra Tay­lor Swain.

Mad­off be­came choked up near the end of his state­ment af­ter he de­scribed de­cid­ing with his broth­er which favoured friends, clients and fam­i­ly mem­bers should re­ceive the $300 mil­lion that re­mained in the com­pa­ny's ac­counts. The cheques nev­er went out.

On­ly weeks be­fore, the clients had been told their in­vest­ment had grown to more than $65 bil­lion. The plea was con­sis­tent with Bernard Mad­off's own claims that his broth­er and two sons were in the dark about his mis­deeds. Pe­ter Mad­off ad­mit­ted Fri­day that he tried to hide mil­lions of dol­lars from the In­ter­nal Rev­enue Ser­vice. Since the fraud was re­vealed, a court-ap­point­ed trustee has reached agree­ments to re­cov­er ap­prox­i­mate­ly $9.1 bil­lion and has dis­trib­uted more than $1.1 bil­lion to Mad­off's vic­tims.

AP