State Sen. Loretta Weinberg (D-Teaneck) becomes the first victim of Bernard Madoff's ponzi scheme to run for public office.  Gov. Jon Corzine is expected to announce his selection of the 74-year-old grandmother as the Democratic nominee for Lt. Governor at the Bergen Performing Arts Center in Englewood at 2PM tomorrow.

The Wall Street Journal reported last December that Weinberg lost her life savings - an estimated $1.3 million that she had invested with Stanley Chais, a Los Angeles financial planner.  Weinberg said she had never heard of Madoff until December, when the scandal broke."Irwin had a saying, 'If you made a dollar and a half, you put 75 cents into a savings account and you lived on the other 75 cents,' " the Journal quotes Weinberg, speaking of her late husband, who had his own business building and designing retail stores. "That's how we lived."

In a December interview with PolitickerNJ.com's Max Pizarro, the senator described her husband as a hard-working child of the Depression and said of the news, "This is another road in one's life that one must traverse. I'm a lot better off than a lot of other people who were affected by this.

"I have work to do and that's the best antidote to this," Weinberg said. "All I will say about Bernard Madoff is his legacy to the world will be that he took money from the Eli Wiesel Foundation."