Investors who put their fortunes in the hands of arrested New York money manager Bernard Madoff are waiting to hear how much of their stake is left.

The roster of potential victims in what prosecutors said was a $50 billion Ponzi scheme has grown exponentially longer in the past few days.

Madoff, 70, said in regulatory filings that he only had around 25 clients, but it has become apparent that the list of people who lost money may number in the hundreds or even thousands.

Among those who have acknowledged potential losses so far: Former Philadelphia Eagles owner Norman Braman, New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon and J. Ezra Merkin, the chairman of GMAC Financial Services.

A charity in Massachusetts that supports Jewish programs, the Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation, said it had invested its entire $8 million endowment with Madoff. The organization's executive director said she doesn't expect it to survive.

Other institutions that believed they had lost millions included The North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System and the Texas-based Julian J. Levitt Foundation.

Hedge funds and other investment groups looked like big losers too. The Fairfield Greenwich Group said it had some $7.5 billion in investments linked to Madoff. A private Swiss bank, Banque Benedict Hentsch Fairfield Partners SA, said it had $47.5 million worth of client assets at risk.

The losses may have extended far beyond the coffers of the wealthy and powerful.

The town of Fairfield, Conn., said it placed nearly 15 percent of its retiree pension fund with Madoff. Officials were scrambling to determine how much of the $42 million remained.

Harry Susman, an attorney in Houston, said he represents a group of clients who had unknowingly become entangled in the scandal by investing in a hedge fund managed by Merkin, which then put almost all of its $1.8 billion in capital in Madoff's hands.

"They had no idea they had exposure," Susman said. He said his clients were now dumbfounded as to how the fund came to invest all of its holdings with just one man, especially since concerns had been circulating for years about Madoff's operations.

For decades, Madoff had dual reputations among investors. Many wealthy New Yorkers and Floridians considered him a reliable investment whiz. Others, more skeptical, had questioned whether his returns were real, pointing to the firm's secrecy and lack of a big-name auditor.

But when he met privately with a family member at his firm earlier this month, something clearly was amiss.

First, federal authorities say the 70-year-old Madoff surprised the unidentified family member by saying he wanted to pass out hefty annual bonuses two months earlier than usual, court papers said. Then, when challenged on the idea, he said he "wasn't sure he would be able to hold it together" if they continued the discussion at the office, and invited him to his apartment.

It was the beginning of a stunning meltdown for the former Nasdaq stock market chairman.

Madoff himself described his investment business as an unsophisticated "Ponzi scheme," according to investigators who interviewed him.

Perhaps more startling than the loss was that it apparently caught regulators and investigators off guard, only coming to light last week when Madoff's own family turned him in.

The core of the scheme - taking investments from one client to pay returns to another - "has been around since the beginning of time," said Marc Powers, a former Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement chief and head of the securities practice at Baker Hostetler.

The firm somehow pulled off the fraud despite being subject to examination by the SEC, Powers added. "You wonder how these things escaped the normally careful review of these regulatory organizations."

The latest dose of bad news in the world of finance has left Madoff's clients "panicked," said Stephen A. Weiss, a lawyer for several dozen investors. "These people are sorrowful. These people are angry. And many are now destitute."

The wave of ill will - fuel for inevitable lawsuits - was aimed at a man who had cultivated an image as a straight-shooter with a personal touch.

The day after his arrest, his company's Web site still boasted that "in an era of faceless organizations ... Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC harks back to an earlier era in the financial world: The owner's name is on the door."

It went on to say "Bernard Madoff has a personal interest in maintaining the unblemished record of value, fair-dealing, and high ethical standards that has always been the firm's hallmark."

Madoff's resume was the stuff of Wall Street legend: He founded his company in 1960 with $5,000 he earned in part working as a lifeguard on Long Island beaches while putting himself through Hofstra University Law School. It eventually became one of five broker-dealers that spearheaded the formation of the Nasdaq Stock Market, where he served as a member of the board of governors in the 1980s and as chairman of the board of directors in the early '90s.

By 2001, Madoff's firm was one of the three top market makers in Nasdaq stocks and the third-largest firm matching buyers and sellers of securities on the New York Stock Exchange, according to Baron's.

Investigators say Madoff's crime originated in a separate and secretive investment-advising business.

Madoff apparently kept the loss a secret even from his two sons and other family members who work at the firm until he and two of them retreated to his apartment occupying the entire 12th floor of an Upper East Side building on Dec. 9, according the complaint drawn up by an arresting FBI agent.

"It's all just one big lie," he told his family. He confided he had blown the money in what was "basically, a giant Ponzi scheme," the complaint added.

Several attorneys representing investors, however, have questioned how he could have acted alone, given the size of the alleged fraud and vast holdings of his firm.

According to the court complaint, Madoff told his family he expected to end up behind bars, but wanted to execute his own version of a bailout package by doling out $200 to $300 million he had left to family, friends and employees. After the meeting, a lawyer for the family contacted regulators, who alerted the federal prosecutors and the FBI.

She was a beautiful, round-faced little girl with large, coal-black eyes and an instant smile. Two years later, the 3-year-old is blind and scarred, her mother is dead and her father's new wife can't cope with caring for her.

Shams, whose name in Arabic means "sun," is among tens of thousands of Iraqis whose suffering will linger long after the war ends.

Shams' young life changed on Nov. 23, 2006, when a car bomb exploded near her father's pickup as he was driving his family - his wife, two sons and the daughter - home after a visit to his wife's parents in the Shiite district of Sadr City.

The blast engulfed their car in flames. Shams and her mother, who was fatally injured in the blast, were thrown from the backseat into street. Her father, Husham Fadhil, tried to douse the flames on his wife's clothing.

But there was little he could do for his 1-year-old daughter, lying face down next to her dying mother.

"I was totally preoccupied with putting out the flames which were burning my wife's body," Fadhil, 32, said. "Then, I lifted Shams and saw her face covered with blood. I thought that they were caused by minor injuries that would heal. Later, I learned that the blood was coming from her badly injured eyes."

The car bomb was one of a series of attacks in Sadr City, including rocket and mortar fire. Iraq's medical and rescue services were strained to cope with the carnage that day, when about 160 people were killed.

Ambulance attendants loaded the dead and wounded into vehicles and sped off to hospitals. Fadhil's wife Wafa, Shams and the two boys - 3-year-old Taif and 5-year-old Gaith - were rushed to separate hospitals. It took Fadhil hours to track them down.

"After searching for 24 hours, I found her in the Medical City compound," he said. "The doctors there took care of her burns but neglected her eye injuries" that left her blind.

In 2007, Fadhil took his daughter to Amman, Jordan, with the assistance of Doctors Without Borders. But the Jordanian doctors told him there was little they could do because Shams didn't get proper treatment at the time she was wounded.

"Had there been proper treatment of her eyes at that time, she could have at least had one of her eyes safe and active by now."

Months later, Fadhil took her to Iran, hoping for a miracle cure.

"All of them gave us the same response," he said. "They said take her to Europe. There doctors can transplant corneas for her. But no one seems ready to help us get her there."

After his wife's death, Fadhil remarried. But the new wife refused to care for Shams, who was given to her father's relatives next door in eastern Baghdad.

Two years after the blast, Shams walks haphazardly through the house, finding her way by touching the wall with her tiny pinkish fingers. If she bumps into someone, she clutches them and asks to be hugged or carried.

Occasionally, she cries out, "Mommy, Daddy, Granny."

Iran is no longer actively supplying Iraqi militias with a particularly lethal kind of roadside bomb, a decision that suggests a strategic shift by the Iranian leadership, U.S. and Iraqi authorities said Thursday.

Use of the armor-piercing explosives - known as explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs - has dwindled sharply in recent months, said Army Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, head of the Pentagon office created to counter roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Metz estimated that U.S. forces find between 12 and 20 of the devices in Iraq each month, down from 60 to 80 earlier this year.

"Someone ... has made the decision to bring them down," Metz told reporters.

Asked if the elite Iranian Republican Guard Corps has made a deliberate choice to limit use of EFPs, Metz nodded: "I think you could draw that inference from the data."

Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh agreed Iran has curtailed its activity inside Iraq. He said he thinks Iran has concluded that a new security agreement between the U.S. and Iraq poses no threat to Iran. Iran opposed the agreement as a blessing for foreign forces to remain in Iraq, and encouraged Iraq's democratic government to reject it.

The United States has long claimed that Iran or Iranian-backed groups are using Iraqi Shiite militias as proxies to kill U.S. troops in Iraq. Iran denies the Bush administration allegations that it supplies money and weapons, but independent analysts have said U.S. evidence is strong, if circumstantial.

The U.S. cites the spread of powerful EFP roadside bombs as the clearest Iranian fingerprint. U.S. military officers say they know the EFPs come from Iran because they bear Iranian markings and because captured militants have told them so. The workmanship is so precise they could only come from a modern factory with machine tools available in Iran but not Iraq.

EFPs account for only about 5 percent of the roadside bombs found in Iraq but 30 percent of the casualties, Metz said.

The U.S. has never specified who in Iran's government it believes is responsible. But military briefers point out that the Quds Force branch of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, which report to Iran's supreme leader, has a history of supporting Shiite militants outside Iran.

The Army has said EFP attacks declined late last year in apparent response to an Iranian pledge to Iraq's Shiite-led government that it would hold back the flow of weapons. By early 2008, however, the U.S. was again accusing Iran of supplying EFPs.

"It is my opinion, it is the policy of the Iranian government, approved to highest level of that government, to facilitate the killing of Americans in Iraq," CIA Director Michael Hayden said in April.

U.S. military officials have said it had caches of weapons with date stamps showing they were produced in Iran this year. Besides EFPs, the military said it found Iranian mortars, rockets, small arms and other kinds of roadside bombs.

Metz said the use of roadside bombs, which the military calls improvised explosive devices or IEDs, is declining as overall violence goes down in Iraq. Use of the often crude ambush bombs increased in Afghanistan during the seasonal height in fighting this year.

Pentagon statistics showed that in October, U.S. and allied forces discovered 411 such bombs, down from 1,321 a year earlier and 2,529 in October 2006, when violence was raging across Iraq.

Roadside bombs killed two coalition soldiers in October, down from 20 the year before and 74 in October 2006, the statistics showed.