To Fellow Inmates, Madoff's So Bad, He's Good

Schadenfreude-starved followers of the Palm Beach pirate may be delighted to hear this, from an inmate at Madoff's prison in Butner, North Carolina, courtesy the New York Post:

"Some of the guys were talking about smacking him around a little, just to get the notoriety of it."

But don't get your hopes up, haters. Remember that a prison is full of villains, a demographic that forms its opinion of newcomers based on how they treated other villains. By this perverse standard, Madoff deserves the Nobel Prize:

"He got a lot of respect from other inmates because he didn't tell on anybody, he didn't take everybody down with him," the source said.

"Some of the inmates admired that."

Not that you have to be in prison to admire this trait. A few other locals who give Madoff an approving wink of the eye: Michael Bienes and Frank Avellino, who hunted for Madoff investors from a Broward and Palm Beach County base. Same for Carl Shapiro and Robert Jaffe, the old tycoon and his son-in-law who are having their lives' most stressful summer in Massachusetts, hoping to hell they can make it to their Palm Beach digs this winter, indictment-free.