It would be criminal to tarnish an elegant 87-year-old New York City penthouse with guilt by association, unfair to imply that it is haunted by the ghosts of white-collar crooks or burdened by bad karma and negative vibes. But the classically proportioned seven-room duplex at 133 East 64th Street where the serial swindler Bernard L. Madoff once lived is poised to enter the marketplace yet again. He bought it for a song in 1984 compared with what his fellow financiers were spending on tonier Park and Fifth Avenues, and had lived there until 2009, when he traded his final weeks of high-end house arrest for a 150-year prison term in bucolic North Carolina. This time the seller of the inviting aerie, PHA, is not the federal Justice Department seeking restitution funds for victims of Mr. Madoff’s $65 billion Ponzi scheme, and the asking price is not $9.9 million (later trimmed to $8.9 million, a reduction that prompted a spate of offers despite the building’s ho-hum location on a busy corner at Lexington Avenue). The current seller is the post-Madoff owner, and the asking price is $17.25 million, but as before, the circumstances are tinged with bitterness. More in the New York Times here.
