PALM BEACH, FL -- Medics responded to Jeffry Picower's Palm beach estate
answering a drowning call.

They were slightly delayed getting through the security gate because of the
security code difficulties.

Two people described as Picower's wife and housekeeper said they had left him
near the pool to go back in the house.

They came back outside to find at the bottom of the pool. They had pulled him
out by the time fire rescue got to the scene.

"They said here was 15 min between time he went swimming and the time he had
gone to the bottom of the pool," said Palm Beach Fire Chief Don Taylor.

Jeffry Picower is widely know for philanthropic generosity had been living under
a cloud of the Madoff scandal, most recently facing a lawsuit filed by the
trustee in charge of getting back money stolen by Bernie Madoff.

Trustee Irving Picard charged Picower and his wife reaped 7 billion dollars from
investments with Bernie Madoff as players in the ponzi scheme.

Between December 1995 and December 2008, Picower and his family withdrew from
their various Madoff accounts $5.1 billion more than they invested with the
self-confessed swindler, according to a lawsuit filed by the trustee.

Financial expert John Pickett says Picower got a jaw dropping return on his
investment with Madoff.

"He achieved with Madoff outsized return of 950 to 800 percent. The interesting
thing should he have known that something like that was not possible that was
the key question," said Pickett.

But Picower's lawyer maintained "They were totally shocked by his fraud and were
in no way complicit in it," he said. "They lost billions of personal assets and
most dear to them, all the assets of their esteemed foundation."

Picowers death further clouds the effort to return money to Madoff victims and
leaves lingering question about how much he know.

"You look at the return he was getting and you have a lot of people speculating
if there was outside knowledge people were looking to him for a possible
confirmation, knowing more than he was letting on with his death that sort of
dies with him"

Source (w/pic & more links):
http://www.wptv.com/content/news/centralpbc/palmbeach/story/Jeffry-Picower-dies-\
from-apparent-drowning/0d25PVcbokyg72ygX-UqDw.cspx