I find it comical to see Bernie Madoff‘s victims — and all the invincible champions of Truth and Justice — celebrating Madoff’s 150-year sentence. After laughing all the way to the banks for years (those would be the banks where the billions he stole still remain safely stashed away), I think Bernie is now laughing all the way to jail.

Hasn’t Madoff got exactly the outcomes he began to fervently hope for as soon as it became clear last December that the game was up?

Humor me, and assume that when Madoff realized he couldn’t keep up the lie any more, before he staged that brilliant confess-to-my-sons-and-have-them-turn-me-in stratagem, he first sat down and wrote out a script for how he’d love to see events play out. Now ask yourself if that script could have contemplated much more than exactly what has come to pass?

First, the billions he stole remain thoroughly unfound.

I’m tired of reading media reports that make it sound like Madoff somehow managed to spend all the billions he stole:

The statements sent to investors showing their accounts were worth as much as $65 billion were fiction.

The investigation has found that in reality Madoff never made any investments, instead using the money from new investors to pay returns to existing clients _ and to finance a lavish lifestyle for his family.

That’s from yesterday’s Huffington Post, and the Huffington Post should really know better, especially at this stage in the Madoff story.

Madoff’s net take — what he took in from investors, minus what he paid to investors who cashed out, minus the modest 9% annual return he paid out to those investors who were not reinvesting that return — obviously isn’t $65 billion, but equally obviously it must be in the tens of billions. That’s a hell of a lot of money to just piss away, even if you were determinedly pissing it away for years. And there’s no evidence at all that the Madoff family was.

So, “lavish lifestyle” is all very well. But all the tens of billions Madoff stole didn’t go into conspicuous consumption. He stole billions more than he spent. And not only does nobody know where the hell any of that money is, nobody seems to even be asking.

Madoff may now be in prison for the rest of his life. But once the gig was going to be up anyway, there was no evading that. And it looks very much like the Madoff family has got away with billions that are safely stashed away nobody-will-ever-know-where.

Second, everyone else in Madoff’s family gets away scot-free. Yes, they did have to part with a few paltry millions in real estate and other assets. But not one of them faces charges, or even the prospect of charges. And somehow I suspect that the loss of those millions doesn’t hurt too deeply.