Jailed financier Bernie Madoff allegedly has told fellow inmates he has cancer and doesn't have much longer to live, sources in North Carolina said.

Madoff, 71, is serving 150 years at a prison in Butner, N.C., for swindling more than $65 billion from clients in an enormous Ponzi scheme.

Inmates at the prison said Madoff talks openly about his alleged illness and participates in American Indian purification ceremonies held at a "sweat lodge" on the prison grounds, The New York Post reported in an exclusive Monday.

"He's been taking about 20 pills a day for his cancer," one inmate told the Post. "He talks about it all the time. He's not doing very well."

Lawyers for Madoff and his wife, Ruth, did not return messages left by the Post Sunday. When asked previously if Madoff had cancer, the lawyers neither confirmed nor denied an illness, the Post reported.

Some sources of the Post said Madoff may have taken the fall for the Ponzi scheme, and implicated no one else, because he knew he was suffering from pancreatic cancer and didn't have long to live, the Post reported.