The collapse of an alleged investment scheme run by Bernard Madoff has wiped out the Picower Foundation, which was based in Palm Beach and distributed almost $270 million over two decades, including significant gifts to dozens of local programs.

Barbara Picower, who started the foundation with her husband, investor Jeffry Picower, in 1989, sent an e-mail Friday to charities she supported, telling them she had no more money to make grants. The foundation will close within months.

The Picower Foundation is the largest so far to announce it was ruined by an alleged Ponzi scheme that might total $50 billion in losses. It was the second-largest foundation in Florida, with assets previously listed at $1 billion.

Almost all of its assets were managed by Madoff, whose "act of fraud has had a devastating impact on tens of thousands of lives as well as numerous philanthropic foundations and nonprofit organizations," Picower wrote in her statement.

She gave to the Palm Beach County School District, the South Florida Science Museum and the Boys & Girls Clubs of Palm Beach County.

At the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach, the foundation built the Picower Foundation Arts Education Center, with studios, art laboratories, classrooms and 4,500 square feet of rehearsal space.

Tana Ebbole, chief executive of the Children's Services Council of Palm Beach County, had four projects paid for in part by Picower. Those projects included a program that sends nurses to the homes of local mothers and an organization that helps improve the quality of after-school programs.