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Bernie Madoff can’t let go.

He still hangs on each nugget of news from the outside, still points fingers, still spins his own story.

And, on occasion, he still mourns — something, he says, he will do for the rest of his life.

But these musings from prison, conveyed in dozens of e-mails to a reporter for The New York Times over the past year, are merely comments from the sidelines. For him, the case of the United States of America v. Bernard L. Madoff is officially over.

But for those he ensnared, the Madoff story drags on. It began on Dec. 11, 2008, when FBI agents arrested a man who, to the world, was a wizard of Wall Street. Madoff soon confessed to a Ponzi scheme that became a symbol of our troubled financial times. Its unraveling took tens of billions of dollars of fictional wealth from thousands of victims around the world.

Madoff marked this day, three years after his arrest, in a federal prison in Butner, North Carolina, where he is serving a 150-year sentence. For countless others affected by his crimes — the lawyers and prosecutors still trying to unravel his scheme; the victims still hoping to recover money; and the Madoff family, who remain targets of public suspicion and hostility — today is but a milepost on a long, long road.

This might have been a triumphant year for Irving H. Picard, the lawyer appointed to unravel the Madoff estate and try to compensate victims.

To date, almost $11 billion has been recovered, more than half of the estimated $18 billion in cash that vanished in the Ponzi scheme.

For Picard, the trustee, 2011 began with court approval of a $7.2 billion settlement by the estate of Jeffry Picower, a longtime Wall Street investor who had profited enormously from his Madoff accounts. Other settlements this year made roughly $1 billion more available for victims.

The year also brought vindication when, last summer, a federal appeals court approved Picard’s formula for determining who should be paid first — a formula that some Madoff investors had denounced as illegal.

But as Picard and David J. Sheehan, his chief counsel at Baker & Hostetler, reach the third anniversary of their difficult but well-paid work, they are still struggling to make headway in the federal courts, and in the court of public opinion.

Their first priority for 2012 will be to appeal several lower court rulings that, together, could reduce by about $11 billion the total they had hoped to recover through future litigation and settlements. The rulings also could rewrite the bankruptcy laws that govern nearly 1,000 lawsuits they have filed.

At issue is whether Picard has the legal right to sue Madoff’s bank and other third parties on behalf of defrauded investors. Also in question is whether there is a safe harbor in the law that prevents Picard from recovering fictional profits that Madoff investors withdrew before the Ponzi scheme collapsed.

And, finally, there is a question of the level of proof Picard must show for his claims that sophisticated investors — specifically, the owners of the New York Mets — were “willfully blind” to the fraud and therefore should return profits and some of their principal.

Handicappers on the legal sidelines say Picard faces an uphill fight on the first issue but they give him better odds on the second.

“He’s had a setback,” said Anthony Sabino, a law professor at St. John’s University, but chances are that Picard will prevail on the safe-harbor question.

As for the third question, all bets are off. The willful blindness issue has been spotlighted in the Mets case by Judge Jed S. Rakoff of US District Court in Manhattan, who is known for bucking conventional wisdom. But in Picard’s favor, Rakoff did not dismiss that element of the Mets case entirely and will allow the trustee to press it at trial in March, said Thomas S. Harty, a lawyer with Cozen O’Connor in Philadelphia.

Such legal uncertainties will hang over the Madoff case through the coming year, if not beyond. But there is no way to appeal verdicts rendered in the court of public opinion against Picard and his employer, the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, which provides a limited safety net for clients of failed brokerage houses.

For the last three years, Picard and SIPC have been fiercely criticized at congressional hearings, on the Internet, in court filings, in several books and in many news media interviews.

Picard’s victory in the federal appeals court had little effect on the hostility of those Madoff investors who are hurt by his claims formula — specifically, those who took more cash from their Madoff accounts over the years than they had put in.

These net winners have argued that their claims should be based on the last account statements they received before Madoff’s arrest — statements showing that his investors were owed a total of $64.8 billion.

Famous millionaires were embarrassed. Middle-class people were wiped out.

Regardless of their personal circumstances, thousands of Madoff investors — from an out-of-work actress to the owners of the New York Mets — are still fighting to recover money or to keep profits that Madoff had assured them were rightfully theirs.

As of Dec. 2, Picard had approved 2,425 claims totaling almost $7.3 billion. But two-thirds of the 16,519 claims originally filed have been denied, either because claimants took out more cash from the Madoff firm than they paid in over the years or did not have an account directly with the firm.

Some investors, like Helen Davis Chaitman, have mobilized to oppose Picard on every front. Chaitman, a lawyer who lost her retirement savings, says she represents about 500 other Madoff investors. She has become a fixture in Picard’s legal fight and has testified before Congress. In the spring, she asserted that Picard had “absolutely no legal authority” for his approach to calculating claims, but the federal appeals court disagreed. The deadline for an appeal to the US Supreme Court is in early February.

At the other end of the spectrum is Howard Siegel, an accountant and lawyer in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. Siegel, 71, ran a fund that invested with Madoff on behalf of 329 other investors.

Siegel’s fund is a net loser — meaning that it lost more cash than it withdrew. People in his situation, he says, make up “the silent, vast majority” of Madoff investors.

Siegel says that he thinks the trustee is doing a good job. As for himself, he says he is managing. “But things have to happen sometime in the foreseeable future for me to continue to be able to manage,” he says.

As he sees it, simple justice requires that net winners return their fictional profits. “If you went to the gym and picked up a gold watch you thought was yours and wore it home and discovered you hadn’t worn your watch that day — would you think you could keep it anyway?” He asks. “If you were called and asked to return it, wouldn’t you do that?”

Three years ago on Sunday, the Madoff family’s world of wealth and privilege was shattered. Two years after the date of the arrest, Madoff’s elder son, Mark, hanged himself in his Manhattan apartment.

For his mother, Ruth Madoff, Mark’s death was bitter proof that she had waited too long to respond to her sons’ demands that she cut off all contact with her husband.

She called Bernie Madoff to tell him of the death and hasn’t spoken to him since, she said in a recent interview.

The entire Madoff family remains locked in litigation with Picard, who has sued them to recover more than $200 million the family received from the Madoff firm over the years.

Late this year, Picard filed an amended version of his complaint against Andrew Madoff, both individually and as the executor of his late brother’s estate; Peter Madoff, a lawyer and for decades a top executive at his brother’s firm; and Peter Madoff’s daughter, Shana Madoff, also a lawyer and former compliance officer at the firm.

That litigation, too, has moved only a few inches down the field. The man at the center of this drama follows these developments obsessively from a medium-security prison in North Carolina.

“One of the many problems of my life here is the amount of time to think,” Madoff wrote recently.

In dozens of e-mails this year, Madoff has fiercely disputed Picard’s assertions that he was a fraud from the start. He calls that allegation “an absurd theory.” His message to Picard and prosecutors: “Stop beating a dead horse,” he wrote, in capital letters, in an e-mail dated Nov. 24.

At this time of the Occupy Wall Street movement, 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.”

Madoff blames himself for his son’s suicide and, in an e-mail on 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.”

The New York Times