Madoff Scandal Impacts Charitable Giving in Massachusetts

Today, the heads of 80 nonprofits around Boston will receive a letter that the Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family Foundation did not want to send. The organization will make no new grants in 2009, as it regroups after the Bernard L. Madoff investment scandal, which claimed about $145 million, or nearly half of its assets. The foundation will give out about $9 million, however, honoring all of its existing financial pledges.

It's another blow to Boston's nonprofit scene, and a glum moment for one of the city's largest and most generous donors, which has given about $100 million to local charities over the past decade.

That's what bothers Carl Shapiro most about the Madoff ordeal, friends and associates say. He entrusted not only hundreds of millions of dollars of his personal wealth to the New York money manager, who allegedly lost $50 billion in a Ponzi scheme, but about 40 percent of the foundation's money. Shapiro was one of Madoff's original investors and considered him a friend.