Bernie Madoff is dead, and it is unlikely that even the people who were once closest to him will shed a tear.

Not his wife, Ruth, whose life was destroyed when Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was revealed in December 2008.

Not his brother, Peter, Madoff’s former chief compliance officer, who spent nearly a decade in prison after pleading guilty to a variety of charges.

Not his niece Shana, Peter Madoff’s daughter, who also worked in the compliance department.

He had to know that once his decades-long Ponzi scheme came to light, it would be ruinous not just to his firm’s clients but to his family.

Madoff was adept at gaining people’s trust. When they discovered that those gains were nothing more than an illusion, they were crushed.

In the months after Madoff’s arrest, I was pretty unsympathetic to the plight of those who had lost money with Madoff. I thought they should have realized that it’s implausible for a money manager to generate the kind of steady returns that Madoff did.

But then someone showed me a statement from Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC. I was astonished. It was extremely detailed, with a long list of securities that the client supposedly owned, along with monthly gains or losses. It must have been arduous for those helping Madoff commit the fraud to compile, and have it add up to a small gain each month. But if you were a relatively unsophisticated investor, could you truly be expected to even suspect that the statement was fraudulent? Unlikely.

In real dollars, the Madoff Ponzi scheme lost about $19 billion. According to the trustee for the Madoff estate, $14.4 billion has been recovered so far, an extraordinary accomplishment.

Even if the trustee, Irving Picard, were to recover the entire $19 billion, the victims would still be out $45 billion. Though that money never truly existed, it was very real in the minds of the victims who were counting on it.

What’s more, many of the victims were sued by Picard, who tried to claw back money that Madoff had paid out to them. The theory — and it is very common in the aftermath of a Ponzi scheme — is that because that money was stolen, it didn’t belong to the recipient. Most people wound up settling with the trustee, which sometimes meant selling a home or making other painful financial sacrifices. Many victims wound up embittered not just because of Madoff but because of the trustee as well.

Last summer, at the age of 82, Madoff petitioned the court for a compassionate release, something the Federal Bureau of Prisons has begun to grant elderly prisoners who are sick. In 2009, he was sentenced to 150 years in prison. But now, he said, he was terminally ill with kidney failure and was likely to die within 18 months.

“When I sentenced Mr. Madoff in 2009, it was fully my intent that he live out the rest of his life in prison,” U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin said. “Nothing has happened in the 11 years since to change my thinking.”

Less than a year later, he died: no family, no friends, no former colleagues.

Joe Nocera is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business.