Oct. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Jeffry Picower, the philanthropist and lawyer alleged to have taken false profits of $6.7 billion from Bernard Madoff’s investment scheme, died today at his Palm Beach, Florida, home, police said.

The police said in a statement that Picower’s wife told dispatchers just after noon local time that she had “just found her husband at the bottom of their swimming pool.” He was taken to Good Samaritan Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, the police said.

“As standard operating procedure in any drowning, the Palm Beach Police Department is conducting an investigation into Mr. Picower’s death,” police said in a statement.

Picower, 67, and his now defunct Palm Beach-based Picower Foundation were sued in May by Irving Picard, the liquidator for Madoff’s investment business Madoff’s investment business. Picard’s lawsuit alleges that Picower and his affiliates benefited from Madoff’s scheme over a 20-year period.

Picower said in court papers filed in July he was a victim of Madoff’s fraud rather than a beneficiary and sought to have the suit dismissed.

The complaint claims Picower and several related defendants should have known that the annual returns they were getting from Madoff -- including some allegedly as high as 950 percent -- were the result of fraud. Picower had said those figures are wrong.

Picard said that Picower received more than $2.4 billion from the fraud during the past six years alone, and that his accounts “were riddled with blatant and obvious fraud.”

Madoff, 71, pleaded guilty in March and was sentenced on June 29 to 150 years in prison for using money from new clients to pay earlier investors. Picard is suing Madoff’s biggest investors and beneficiaries, including offshore hedge funds.

Among the institutions that benefited from Picower’s giving were the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which used a $50 million donation from Picower in 2002 to fund a brain-research center under Nobel prize-winner Susumu Tonegawa.

To contact the reporters on this story: Cordell Eddings in New York at ceddings@bloomberg.net; Jeran Wittenstein in San Francisco at jwittenstei1@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: October 25, 2009 17:02 EDT