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

wanted to kill me he was going to use professionals, and that meant a double-tap with two bullets to the back of my head. In that situation a bullet-proof vest wasn’t going to be any help. I knew that my only hope in that situation was to survive the initial attempt, fire as many shots as quickly as I could, and either get out of there or get help. There were no good options.

By the time I walked out of Sergeant Bates’s office I had calmed down. His confidence had been somewhat reassuring. I knew that if anything happened to me, my family would be protected.

But in addition to meeting with him, I took several additional precautions to make sure I was never put in that situation. I upgraded the alarm system in and around my home, including pick-proof locks. I began altering the routes I traveled to get home at night. I never drove more than a couple of blocks without checking continually in my rearview mirror. In addition, Faith got her handgun license and took lessons in properly handling a weapon—and firing it to hit the target. Eventually she became an excellent shot. We kept guns safely locked up in the house, but always within quick and easy reach.

By nature I’m a cautious person. I am actually one of those strange people who will stand on a street corner waiting for the walk sign, even if I don’t see a car coming. In this situation I was taking every possible precaution to stay alive. There was no way of knowing if, or when, Madoff would figure me out. And finally I made a decision. If he contacted me and threatened me, I was going to drive down to New York and take him out. At that point it would have come down to him or me; it was as simple as that. The government would have forced me into it by failing to do its job, and failing to protect me. In that situation I felt I had no other options. I was going to kill him.

Chapter 6

Didn’t Anyone Want a Pulitzer?

My father was a tough man. For a while he owned two diners and two bar-lounges in Erie, Pennsylvania. He also owned the storefront next to the New York Lunch, as one of the diners was named. He had rented that space to a motorcycle repair shop, which, naturally, became the hangout for the local chapter of the Hell’s Angels. I was in that restaurant one afternoon when my father threw a biker out of the place for causing some kind of problem. A few minutes later the biker came back, tearing through the front door on his Harley, and started doing circles in the middle of the restaurant.

I remember people scrambling to get out of the way, but my father didn’t hesitate. He came running out from behind the counter and knocked him off his bike, then started fighting him. He didn’t care that this guy had a gang backing him up. He was just protecting his livelihood, protecting his family. The fight ended when the short-order cook, Rusty, called the police, ran into the back room and came out pointing a double-barreled shotgun at the biker. A 12-gauge ends a lot of arguments.

I never saw my father back down. I saw him challenge customers who tried to walk out of his place with silverware. I remember him coming home from one of the bars some nights with his face swollen and his knuckles bloody because he’d had to throw a drunk out. I had learned right and wrong from him and that whatever the cost I was supposed to fight the bad guys. So for as long as possible I would continue to fight Madoff with documents, but now I was aware it could get much more dangerous.

In my head, I had worked out my plan to go to New York and kill him if he threatened me. I didn’t tell anyone about it; I certainly didn’t tell Faith or Frank or Neil. I didn’t want to make any of them an accessory to murder. I knew how they would respond if I told them. At first they wouldn’t believe me: Harry? Kill someone? Forget it, it isn’t going to happen. But when they realized I was serious, they would try desperately to talk me out of it.

I wasn’t interested in those conversations. I knew how crazy my plan sounded, but I also knew it was my life and my family’s lives that were in jeopardy.

We had been pursuing Bernie Madoff for almost five years, and the cost of this fight was continuing to rise. Five years earlier I had been in comfortable control of my life. I was earning a reasonable salary working on the equity derivatives desk of a respectable firm, and if it wasn’t particularly exciting most of the time, at least it was interesting. Then Frank Casey dropped Bernie Madoff into my life. I’d ended up leaving that company, in fact leaving the entire industry, because of that, and here I was working in an attic office, never leaving my house without being armed, and always being careful to avoid shady areas. I hadn’t earned a paycheck in more than a year, and I was forced to watch helplessly as Madoff continued to steal billions more dollars and the people who could stop him instead treated me as their enemy.

Only the fact that I was part of a team made it tolerable. Frank Casey, Neil Chelo, and Mike Ocrant continued to gather information and feed it to me, and whenever we heard something new or got hold of a Madoff document, a flurry of angry, funny, sarcastic, ironic, and occasionally bitter e-mails would circulate among us. Early in 2006, for example, Neil finally found a former employee of Madoff who was willing to talk. This man had worked for Madoff for three years in the mid-1990s and