The New York trustee appointed to unravel Bernard Madoff’s massive fraud wants for the first time to distribute some of the stolen money to the disgraced financier’s victims.

Trustee Irving Picard asked a Manhattan bankruptcy court on Wednesday to approve a $2.6 billion allocation. The initial payout would total $272 million.

Picard says he’s so far recovered about $7.6 billion of the estimated $17.3 billion in principal lost by clients of Madoff’s secretive investment advisory service.

Madoff admitted in a guilty plea in 2009 that he was running a giant Ponzi scheme. He’s serving a 150-year prison sentence.