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

list; they were gunning for us. But this was different. This time the enemy was a grandfatherly philanthropist, the most respected man in his community, perhaps the very last person anyone would suspect of violence. But we already knew that his reputation was his disguise, and that in fact he was a world-class criminal. What nobody could predict was how far he would go to protect himself—and what the consequences would be to anyone in his path. If it did reach that point, I was nothing more than an inconvenience to him.

Looking over my shoulder when I walked down the street or checking underneath the chassis and in the wheel wells of my car before I turned the key no longer seemed like enough protection. I had started carrying an airweight Model 642 Smith and Wesson everywhere I went. Finally I decided it was time to get some outside help.

I knew the only people I could depend on to be there for me and my family 24 hours a day were the officers of the Whitman, Massachusetts, police department. I trusted my local police department far more than any federal agency. I’d spent years being disappointed by the federal government. To the Massachusetts state police, or even the Plymouth County sheriff’s department, I was simply another citizen living in their jurisdiction. That left the local cops, whose station was only a few blocks from my house.

Whitman is a typical New England small town, with a population under 15,000. We have a long history and a small town center, which has always been a good place for neighbors to meet. Some of our houses date to before the Revolution, and it’s possible to determine on which side of that fight the residents were by looking at their chimneys—loyalists to the crown had a black stripe around the top, which in some cases is still there. Later Whitman became the home of Toll House cookies. Faith and I had lived there happily for almost seven years, but suddenly I began to see the most familiar places in a different kind of way. Would that corner be a good place for an ambush? Or who was that person sitting across from us having a slice of pizza in the Venus? It was odd; Bernie Madoff had become a central figure in my life—and my fervent hope was that he didn’t even know I existed.

Whitman measures only 6.97 square miles, meaning it would take a police car about a minute to get to my house from anywhere in the town. And no one cares about the citizens of the town of Whitman more than our local police department.

When Faith and I had moved to Whitman, I had gone to the local precinct to apply for a firearms permit. I had met Sergeant Harry Bates that day and since then I had often seen him around our town center. It was always pleasant, always calm, so when I came barging into his office one afternoon pale as a ghost, sweating profusely, he knew that whatever was bothering me was serious. “I need to talk to you,” I told him, “in your office.”

Truthfully I don’t remember exactly what it was that had set off my panic button. It might have been something as simple as a hang-up call or a car that stopped in front of my house and sat there too long. Maybe it was something I read, a seemingly innocent comment somebody made, or two pieces of information that didn’t fit together easily. But whatever it was, it pushed all my buttons. I realized suddenly that I had to make sure somebody was going to come running when I yelled for help. Somebody with firepower.

Harry Bates settled comfortably into his chair. “What’s going on, Harry?”

I laid out the broad strokes for him. Basically, I told him I had uncovered a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme that was global and the biggest fraud in history and I was afraid people might try to kill me to shut me up. While he didn’t know what a Ponzi scheme was, he certainly understood billions of dollars.

“What do you want us to do?” he asked. “Where do you want me to take this?”

“You have to keep this very quiet,” I explained. “If you put this in the precinct log and the newspapers pick it up, my life is going to be in jeopardy. If you talk about it and the word gets out, my life is going to be in jeopardy.” It took a little while for Sergeant Bates to understand I was deadly serious about this, but to his credit he began working with me to set up the safest possible situation. We agreed on a simple plan. He knew if I called for help he had to come running with the whole cavalry. He knew if my home alarm went off it wasn’t a going to be a false alarm.

Then he asked me, “You carrying?” We talked about guns for a while. Obviously he knew I had a license; he’d filled out the forms. I told him that I was now carrying a weapon with me wherever I went. I’d opted for a lightweight gun, I said. I felt it was better to have a weapon I could fire rapidly than something with massive stopping power. He reviewed the state gun control laws, particularly what was permitted in public. Massachusetts has tough regulations and he didn’t want me to have any problems.

Then he asked me if I wanted to wear body armor. I had thought about it. The army had taught me there were three things you had to be able to do to protect yourself: shoot, move, and communicate. I certainly was trying to communicate; I had been trained pretty well to handle the shooting part; that left mobility—which was why I decided not to wear a bullet-proof vest. I actually tried on several different types, but all of them restricted my movement. If Madoff