“How long will he get?”

“Will he be handcuffed?”

The swarms of reporters, cameramen, victims and gawkers began gathering outside a federal courthouse in Manhattan early Monday morning to catch one last glimpse of the man who seemed to define an era of unprecedented greed and fraud on Wall Street.

In reality, they had been waiting for this moment since March, when Bernard L. Madoff admitted that he had run a vast Ponzi scheme that robbed thousands of people of their life savings.

“We’re hoping for a big sentence only as a deterrent,” Cynthia Friedman, a victim of Mr. Madoff’s fraud, told a crowd of reporters before his sentence was handed down. Mrs. Friedman and her husband, Richard, who lost their life savings with Mr. Madoff, spent more than an hour doing interviews with media outlets.

But if this was a media circus, a Wall Street version of the O. J. Simpson case, its center-ring star was nowhere in sight. Mr. Madoff was in a courtroom inside, having been whisked to the defendant’s table through an underground passageway. In the end, the throng was left without even a glimpse of Mr. Madoff, whose fate was sealed at 11:32 a.m. with a sentence of 150 years in prison.

And while they may have been disappointed that their villain was not brought into plain view, when the decision was announced, the frenzy outside Federal District Court on Worth Street surged anew as the verdict flashed across the world — in Chinese, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish and more.

The word spread just as quickly among those crowding the front of the courthouse. Some typed text messages and placed calls to their friends. Photographers and television crews swarmed. Television producers pounced on the approximately two dozen victims who had managed to make their way into Mr. Madoff’s presence inside the courtroom Monday, as they began to emerge from the building.

“I was very surprised,” Dominic Ambrosino told reporters outside the court. “It felt good.”

“I told the judge that when Bernard Madoff leaves prison, which means after his death, that he will then go down to the depths of hell where he’ll join those other people who are in the mouths of Satan,” Burt Ross, the former mayor of Fort Lee, N.J., who lost $5 million with Mr. Madoff, told the crowded press corps outside the courthouse.

Mr. Madoff “discarded me like road kill,” said Miriam Siegman of Stamford, Conn., who spoke at the hearing.

Another woman who had lost money in the scam, who was supporting herself on a rolling cart, nearly fainted as she was surrounded by reporters peppering her with questions.

Amid the whirl, tourists snapped photos with cellphones. Police tried to corral people who had spilled onto the street. A man with statue of a caged bear and a name tag reading “Bernard Madoff” hanging from its neck sat on a cart outside the courthouse. Several sketch artists sold paintings and drawings of Mr. Madoff in court, his hands in a prayer position as he sat at a desk facing Judge Denny Chin.

There was, however, no sign of the very wealthy investors who lost billions of dollars in the scam. The only celebrity sighting occurred when Michael Imperioli from “The Sopranos” appeared among the crowd of onlookers outside the courthouse.

Mr. Imperioli said he was not a victim of Mr. Madoff, but was conducting research for a forthcoming project.

“It was surprising how few victims were standing outside the courthouse; it was all press,” said Jennifer Rhodes, who lives nearby and knows several victims of Mr. Madoff’s scheme. “There is a great deal of shame felt when one is a victim of a crime.”

While pleased with verdict, most of the victims who appeared at the scene turned their attention to how much could be recovered from what remained of Mr. Madoff’s assets.

Several broke away to start their own rally a few blocks from the courthouse at Foley Square, against the backdrop of 60-foot sculpture called “Triumph of the Human Spirit” by Lorenzo Price. Gathering in front of about 100 reporters who trailed them, their anger had shifted from Mr. Madoff’s actions to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which they criticized for missing warning signs of the fraud.

They also accused Irving H. Picard, the court-appointed trustee charged with gathering what is left of Mr. Madoff’s assets, of flouting the laws by not honoring their claims with the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, which insures customers when brokerage firms fail.

“SEC FAILED US,” was emblazoned on one participant’s T-shirt. Others held signs, reading “SIPC = SCAM.”

“The S.E.C. has done nothing to enforce the Securities Investor Protection Corp.,” said Helen Davis Chaitman, a retiree who spoke at the rally. Ms. Chaitman is leading a group of Madoff victims who have sued Mr. Picard to change the way he calculates claims.

“SIPC is a scam,” said Stanley Hirschhorn, a Madoff victim who traveled from Manalapan, N.J., with his wife and daughter for the sentencing. “Goldman Sachs pays $150 a year in fees to SIPC and if one day they were discovered to be running a $2 billion Ponzi scheme, there wouldn’t be enough to reimburse everyone.”

“No one can trust the honesty of the securities industry,” Ms. Chaitman added later. “We have learned that from Madoff, from Stanford and from the global economic collapse caused by the unremitting greed of Wall Street,” she said, referring to R. Allen Stanford, the Texas billionaire who is involved in his own legal battle amid accusations by the S.E.C. that he operated a big Ponzi scheme.

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