NEW YORK AP – More than 100 victims of failed financier Bernard Madoff’s multibillion-dollar fraud urged a judge Monday to sentence him harshly, saying he ruined their lives, leaving many of them depressed, bitter and hopeless.

“Please don’t let his brilliant criminal mind loose to do it again,” Steve Norton pleaded in a letter to the judge after describing how he lost $1.1 million in retirement money. “He took the rest of our lives. Don’t give him his back.”