No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller by Harry Markopolos (i wanna iguana read aloud .txt) 📕

of $20 billion that the SEC was going to allow these companies to get away with. I decided to see if the Massachusetts Securities Division would be interested in pursuing these cases. For me, this was also sort of a test. If the state would aggressively pursue these cases, I would hand them Madoff. My local state representative at that time, a wonderful woman named Kathleen Teahan, lived only a few blocks from me. I often saw her on the streets of our small town, and one day I happened to run into her, ironically in front of the bank. I have a problem, I told her. I’ve uncovered several cases of securities fraud. A lot of people were being victimized, and I thought it might be something William Galvin would be interested in.

No elected official has ever done a better job for a constituent than Kathleen. Without knowing all the details, she arranged a meeting for me with two senior members of Galvin’s staff, picked me up in front of my house and drove me to the statehouse, accompanied me into the meeting room, and introduced me to the people I was scheduled to meet with. Unfortunately, that was all she could do. I explained to them that I had several cases in which mutual funds were making millions by market timing and that the SEC was not interested in enforcing any of its investor protection statutes. I pointed out to them that my cases didn’t involve fraud against the government—these companies had defrauded citizens of the state. Then I asked, “Does the state have a bounty program?” It did not. “Would you be willing to enact one?” Nope.

While these were nice people, and maybe they even wanted to do the proper thing, I was not impressed with their knowledge of the securities laws. I had considered trusting them with my biggest case, Bernie, but the market timing meeting went so poorly that I never said a word about it.

For me, of course, it meant that I wasn’t going to earn any money for more than a year’s work. The bounty that I had expected was never going to be paid, but by far the most difficult task I had was telling my whistleblowers that the government had not accepted their case. These were heroes, people who had risked their careers, as it turned out, for nothing. It was very difficult for some of those people to ease back into their regular routines. Now they understood why the goddess of justice was wearing a blindfold.

My Madoff team was now split up and living in four different places. I was in Boston; Neil was in Tacoma, Washington; Frank was in Manalapan, New Jersey; and Mike remained in New York. But our investigation never stopped; it never even slowed down. The investigation of Bernie Madoff simply had become a part of our lives—it no longer had any specific objective or end in sight. We kept doing it because we had been doing it, and I think the surreal aspect of it amazed us. We had discovered the largest financial crime in history. Many people knew about it, and apparently there was no mechanism available to stop it. I had considered approaching law enforcement—the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), for example—but it seemed obvious to me that if the federal agency charged with stopping this type of criminal activity couldn’t find the crime, the people at the FBI certainly wouldn’t take my charges seriously. And even if they did, it was very doubtful they would understand it. By 2004 the FBI’s focus was on catching terrorists, and it had been busy transferring agents from white-collar fraud to counterterrorism units.

During the years we continued working on this case, several huge Wall Street crimes had been uncovered. Among them, Tyco’s CEO Dennis Kozlowski supposedly had taken more than $400 million in unauthorized bonuses from his company and used some of that money to buy $700 office garbage pails and throw a multimillion-dollar Roman-orgy-themed birthday party in Sardinia for his wife’s 40th birthday; Enron’s Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling had bankrupted that company and defrauded millions of energy consumers of billions of dollars; and WorldCom’s Bernie Ebbers had been convicted of using phony accounting to defraud investors of as much as $11 billion. As each of these crimes made headlines, law enforcement and other people on Wall Street made somber statements about how they were taking steps to make sure that kind of fraud couldn’t happen again, and what they were doing to protect investors. There was nothing we could do but laugh at them. I had told them about an ongoing crime that dwarfed the rest of them, a fraud that would directly affect more lives than any of the others, and they just didn’t care. So we just kept going. The situation was crazy and we knew it, and we made a lot of jokes about it because there was simply nothing else we could do.

We were actively tracking 20 feeder funds that we knew had Bernie. We spoke on the phone from time to time, but communicated mostly by e-mail. I still hadn’t even met Mike Ocrant. Neil, in particular, was in a much better position at Benchmark Plus to gather information than he had been at Rampart. Shortly after Frank had been hired by Benchmark, we had lunch in Manalapan with Scott Franzblau, a Benchmark partner and the head of marketing. I assumed that Manalapan was an Indian word for cornfields and cows, because that’s all that surrounded Benchmark’s office. The nearest place to eat was a golf club more than a mile down the road, and we had lunch there.

It’s probable that Frank had already warned Scott about Madoff, because Scott already knew that he was a fraud. I remember him shaking his head in disbelief as we went through some of our evidence. He got it. After that he continued to be supportive of Frank‘s—and later Neil’s—efforts to gather