Another swindled victim of Bernard L. Madoff has taken his life.
William Foxton, 65, a highly decorated retired officer of the British Armed Forces, laid down on a bench in a public park Tuesday, just yards from the family home in Southampton, and put a pistol to his head, according to the BBC.
Foxton’s son, Willard, blamed the suicide on Madoff’s fraud, saying his father had called him a week earlier, saying that he had invested all his money with the New York financial guru and sounding distraught.
Foxton is believed to be the second victim of Madoff’s alleged Ponzi scheme to have committed suicide. Just before Christmas, Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, a French hedge fund executive who had invested his own money, as well as that of some of Europe’s wealthiest families with Madoff, slit his wrists in his midtown New York office.
Foxton’s son, Willard, 28, said his father’s blood is on Madoff’s hands.
“The money had all been invested with Bernie Madoff,” Willard Foxton told the BBC. “He was more shaken then I’d ever heard him. . . He told me that he had lost the money but I did not think he would do something like this.”
The elder Foxton had served with the French Foreign Legion before joining the British Army in 1969 and working his way up to the rank of major, according to the Daily Mail. He had lost his arm in battle in the 1970s and used an artificial limb.
Since his retirement from the military, he worked in the defense and security industries, serving in multiple conflict zones, including Oman, Bosnia, Kosovo and, until a few months ago, Afghanistan, his son said. He received a special decoration for his service in the Balkans where he headed the European Commission Monitoring Mission.
Willard Foxton called his father a “very courageous man, very decent and charismatic.”
“He had just retired but he was always at his happiest when he was overseas doing things for others,” he said
Willard Foxton said he did not know precisely how much money his father had lost.
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2 Comments
#1. TACOM 02.17.2009
Isn’t it strange how lacking in resiliency the well-to-do seem to be? Most of the rest of the working stiffs would expect to get up, shake it off and get on with life. So this “soldier of fortune”
lost a limb, fighting in a country where he had little business being in the first place. He lived by the gun as a war profiteer and it’s only fitting that he should die by the gun. After a lifetime of military involvement in countries in which neither he nor his government had any rightful business, he then capped it off by spending his remaining years working (profitting) for the military industrial complex. If there’s any particular type we need to get rid of, after the lawyers and priests, it’s his type. He saved us the trouble. I judge him from my own position as a 30 year military veteran who, like so many before me, woke up too late to the role I played in furthering elite’s grip on the world’s throat. A pox on all phony heros, a title which has been dragged through the filth of too many lies.
#2. braindeadadministrator 02.17.2009
TACOM , I agree.
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