NEW YORK — Bernard Madoff, who pleaded guilty yesterday to masterminding the largest Ponzi scheme in history, was sent by a federal judge to the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a "horrendous" jail in lower Manhattan that houses swindlers and murderers.

Behind bars, he may have to fight off prison inmates who want to squeeze him for money or blame him for the Wall Street crash.

"Madoff isn't going to be real popular," said Larry Levine, who served 10 years in federal prisons for securities fraud and narcotics trafficking and now advises convicts on surviving time behind bars. "All the guys there will have wives or parents who are losing their homes or their jobs or who can't send money to them anymore. Everybody's going to be blaming Bernie."

The 70-year-old investment adviser was ordered to the 12-story jail by U.S. District Judge Denny Chin until sentencing, scheduled for June 16. He faces as much as 150 years in prison.

Madoff ran a $65 billion fraud that fleeced thousands of investors, including Palm Beach retirees, trustees of Yeshiva University and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who lost his savings and his foundation's assets.

The financier was undone by the Wall Street collapse as last year's 38 percent decline in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index forced his customers to withdraw money, said Roy Smith, a finance professor at New York University's Stern School of Business and former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. partner.

"No one has ever made a Ponzi scheme pay off for so long," Smith said of the scam that prosecutors said dated back two decades. We can replace the old Ponzi scheme with a new Madoff version. It is a monument to the foolishness of people putting money in these places."

Ponzi schemes are named for 1920s financier Charles Ponzi. Money from new investors goes to pay off previous ones.

Metropolitan Correctional Center, where prisoners await sentencing or trial, houses "swindlers to murderers," said Peter Henning, a law professor at Wayne State University in Detroit.

Ira Sorkin, Madoff's lawyer, said he would appeal "as soon as possible" the judge's decision to jail his client.

"We respectfully disagree," he said.

A typical day at the MCC begins with lights on at 6 a.m., breakfast 30 minutes later and lights out at 11 p.m., according to Scott Sussman, a jail spokesman.

Prisoners "are provided with the opportunity for outside recreation every other day," Sussman said. They also can play pingpong and watch television in common areas, he said.

The "bleak" MCC is "horrendous," according to defense attorney Sam Schmidt, who visits the jail several times a week and represented Wadih el-Hage, convicted of federal terrorism charges related to the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa. He visited el-Hage at the facility between 1998 and 2001.

Money manager Martin Armstrong, founder of now-defunct Princeton Economics International Ltd., spent seven years at the MCC on civil-contempt charges before pleading guilty to securities fraud. He started out in the facility's high-security wing with accused terrorists because there were no beds in a regular unit, he said in a January interview, quoting his jailers.

"Sometimes they're good guys," Armstrong said of his fellow prisoners. "Sometimes they're nuts."

Madoff may be housed in isolation because of his high profile, Levine said.

"At no time, for security reasons, is an inmate's housing status public information," MCC spokesman Sussman said.

After hunting down victims for decades, Madoff will now become a target, according to Park Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist at the David Geffen School of Medicine of University of California at Los Angeles.

"In the beginning, he will be besieged by mail that will be threatening and accusatory," said Dietz, who heads a Newport Beach, Calif.-based consulting firm.

"There will be people trying to scam him and people who think he's hiding money," Dietz said. "There will be inmates asking for money, and you don't want them to disbelieve you when you say you don't have it."