The eldest son of convicted fraudster Bernard Madoff was found dead Saturday in his New York apartment, after apparently committing suicide, US media reports said, dpa reported.
Mark Madoff, 45, was found by his father-in-law, the New York Post reported, two years to the day his father was arrested for the largest fraud in US history.
Mark Madoff's two-year-old child was with him in the apartment. His wife and the couple's other son were in Florida at the time.
"Mark Madoff took his own life today," Martin Flumenbaum, the man's lawyer, said in a statement quoted by the New York Times. "This is a terrible and unnecessary tragedy."
The Times quoted police sources as saying Madoff's body was found hanging from its neck by a dog leash attached to a pipe in the ceiling of the apartment.
Mark and his younger brother Andrew worked for their father's brokerage firm, but reportedly did not know about the snowball scheme which defrauded Americans of more than 60 billion dollars.
Bernard Madoff, 72, is currently serving a 150-year-prison sentence for fraud.