A federal judge sentenced Bernard L. Madoff to 150 years in prison today for operating a huge Ponzi scheme that devastated investors, foundations, charities, and others, calling his crimes “extraordinarily evil,” The New York Times reports.

In pronouncing the sentence — the maximum he could have handed down — Judge Denny Chin turned aside Mr. Madoff’s own assertions of remorse and rejected the suggestion from Mr. Madoff’s lawyers that there was a sense of “mob vengeance” surrounding calls for a long prison term.

“Objectively speaking, the fraud here was staggering,” the judge said. “It spanned more than 20 years.”

In The New York Times’s Dealbook blog, Steve M. Davidoff, a law professor, raises questions about whether charities that received money from donors who invested with Mr. Madoff face legal or moral obligations to return the money.

Read an article from The Chronicle’s archive about the problems facing the charities that depended on foundations with big investments in Mr. Madoff’s firm.

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