Notorious scam artist Bernie Madoff said he’ll be forever be haunted by the suicide of his oldest son, rightly blaming himself for the 2010 tragedy.

Mark Madoff hung himself on the second anniversary of his dad’s arrest for a multi-billion-dollar, years-long fraud.

“I was responsible for my son Mark’s death and that’s very, very difficult,” Bernie Madoff told CNNMoney, in a telephone interview from his federal lockup in North Carolina.

“I live with that. I live with the remorse, the pain I caused everybody, certainly my family, and the victims.”

It’s small consolation to Madoff’s victims that struggles to get a good night’s sleep.

“I’m usually up at 4:30 in the morning because I can’t sleep,” said Madoff, 75, who will either die in prison or be released in 2139.

Despite claiming to feel remorse for his son’s suicide, Madoff still tried to make excuses for his $17.5 billion fraud,.

Madoff said he began his ripoff after the Black Monday crash of 1987. The massive sell-off put Madoff in a hole that he believed could be remedied by a little fraud.

“It was certainly never my intention for this to happen,” said Madoff.

“I thought I could work myself out of a temporary situation but it kept getting worse and worse and I didn’t have the courage to admit what I had done. It created a major problem.”

Now Madoff spends his days doing menial tasks at the Butner Federal Correctional Complex, making a whopping $40 a week.

“I used to work as a clerk in the commissary, and now they have me taking care of the telephone and the computer systems,” said Madoff, who didn’t have enough money on the books to phone CNNMoney.

He had to call collect.