Too glib for his own words in peddling his Ponzi scheme, Bernie Madoff today will end his propositions with a sentence.

Not as nefarious a figure as thrill killer Richard Loeb, about whose death that wordplay was coined in 1936 by Chicago newsman Ed Lahey, Madoff didn't kill anybody (unless his victims' suicides count), but he nevertheless perpetrated a lot of grief for a lot more people than Loeb did.

He's expected to get a life sentence, whether it's 13 years, 30, or 50. (His lawyer has promised that Madoff will be dead no later than 2022.) That number will be determined this morning by a federal judge. But other numbers are still hazy.

When Madoff's scheme broke into the news pages, he was said to have ripped off $50 billion. Court-appointed trustee Irving Picard eventually estimated the net losses suffered by investors at $13.2 billion. So far, Picard says (according to this morning's WSJ), only $1.2 billion has been recovered. But the hunt for the missing gelt goes on.

Ruth Madoff's figures, on the other hand, are fairly well set. She's giving up $80 million in assets but, as the WSJ pointed out, gets to keep "just $2.5 million" in cash. It's as if she won the lottery. As former Portfolio contributing editor Gary Weiss (author of Wall Street Versus America) writes: