His message to Mr. Picard and prosecutors: “Stop beating a dead horse,” he wrote, in capital letters, in an e-mail dated Nov. 24.

“It drives me crazy,” Mr. Madoff wrote in mid-October, that the trustee and the government “developed their theory that no trading took place ever.”

He continued: “I wish I never agreed not to go to trial, when all this could have been aired.” And then: “I feel sad that it is not really in anyone’s interest to try and uncover the facts at this point. Not that I would ever be exonerated for the fraud I did commit.”

Mr. Madoff maintains that he went off the tracks in 1992 and would have been found guilty had he stood trial. He says he confessed to spare his family, but he wrote in November, “If I had known that things would turn out the way they did, with all the harassment of my family anyway, I would have spent the money and gone to trial.”

At this time of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Mr. Madoff agrees that there is a lot of rot in Washington and on Wall Street. “It is hard for anyone to imagine all the ills and corruption” he wrote on Oct. 12.

His contempt for the Securities and Exchange Commission is plain:

“It is not that they failed to uncover my fraud,” he wrote on March 4. “It is the fact that for their entire existence they have spent their time and resources on the petty problems of small firms and refuse to deal with the obvious problems and outright violations of the large investment banks who had free reign to cause the eventual destruction of the financial markets. This mentality is still in evidence today.”

He says again and again that the scheme began in 1992 and that he acted alone. A note on Oct. 11 opened with frustration: “I hope you understand that I am in no way trying to rationalize my terrible behavior. If nothing else I will always live with the pain I have caused to many innocent people and the shame I have caused my family. Nothing can ever justify that.”

Mr. Madoff blames himself for his son’s suicide and, in an e-mail last Wednesday, offered this: “For those people who wonder if I feel enough remorse, I can only say that the guilt and pain I live with every moment that is left of my life is impossible to appreciate without going thru it.”