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

was currently at a hedge fund. Neil certainly gave him no indication he was investigating; it was normal business chitchat. This man was pretty open with Neil about Bernie. He had no reason not to be—he believed Bernie’s operation was honest. But he had worked on the 19th floor as a proprietary trader in the brokerage, and had little knowledge about the hedge fund. He’d left on very good terms, convinced that Bernie was “the real deal,” although he admitted that having knowledge of the order book was a big moneymaker. He never saw any of the options transactions, he told Neil, but that didn’t bother him. Bernie and his sons were “brilliant and hardworking,” he told Neil. As Neil concluded his e-mail to me, “He believes in Bernie.”

This type of communication between us was very common and because of that, I never felt like I was in it alone. In addition to the three of them, I also had come to rely on a man named Pat Burns for advice. Pat Burns was the director of communications for Taxpayers Against Fraud, a whistleblower organization in Washington, D.C., and had seen this kind of insanity up close several times before.

Being a whistleblower is extraordinarily lonely, and eventually I had begun searching for other people in a similar circumstance, people who understood what I was going through and who shared my fears. I had found Pat Burns’s organization through an Internet search. I called him and introduced myself, explaining that I had several good cases and I was interested in learning more about the bounty programs.

I was exploring a new world, a world in which people took great risks to expose corruption, and Pat Burns became my guide. We spoke on the phone often and traded e-mails, but it was actually more than a year before we met in person. Pat is tall and balding and, like me, has a broad sense of humor and a visceral dislike for bad guys. He hates to see them win as much as I do. And in the sometimes chaotic world of whistleblowers he was the steady hand. I think it’s accurate to say that he knows more about white-collar fraud in the United States than any man in history. He knows how lawyers and lobbyists work to protect their clients and what can happen to whistleblowers, both the bad and the good. He told me right from the beginning that there was considerably more bad than good, that few whistleblowers ever win and go on to live happily ever after. He’s seen lives destroyed. But beyond answering my questions and helping me navigate through these unfamiliar waters, his presence served as a constant reminder that I wasn’t hanging out there alone.

Eventually I had told Pat everything about our Madoff investigation. I sent him the 2005 submission with the instructions, “If anything should happen to me you’ve got a green light to go to the media immediately. Give the story to anybody who’ll print it.”

He told me that there was an annual conference of whistleblower attorneys and fraud investigators—like me—who met to exchange information and receive updates on new case law. Eventually I went to my first conference and I began learning about the False Claims Act, the law that hopefully would allow me to eventually earn a living. The False Claims Act is the statute that allows anyone to bring legal action against contractors who are cheating the federal government. If the government agrees to prosecute, under the qui tam provision the person filing the case is entitled to a reward that is usually between 15 and 25 percent. Qui tam is a Latin phrase meaning that person “who brings forth a case on behalf of our lord the King, and for himself.” There are “relators,” as the person who finds the case and brings it to the government is known, who have earned many millions of dollars.

The False Claims Act was originally passed by Congress in 1863 to reward people for warning the Union government about dishonest suppliers who were selling them sick horses and mules, spoiled food, and faulty weapons. It became known as the False Claims Act because it was intended to stop people from submitting false claims for government payment, but it also covered several other areas of fraud against the government. It has been strengthened several times since its original passage and is the primary tool used by whistleblowers. The federal government has recovered more than $25 billion in the past two decades. The government accepts only between 15 and 20 percent of the best cases submitted for intervention and, hopefully, a reward. Through Pat Burns I was to become very familiar with all the provisions of this act. I had to; my future depended on it.

Obviously Madoff didn’t fit under this provision (he was cheating everybody except the government), but Pat Burns certainly took an interest in the case. He understood immediately the risks that I was taking. I had seen enough movies in which people are in jeopardy because they have some information that someone wants to keep private, and I would sit there in the audience wondering why the person in jeopardy didn’t simply tell a reporter and get the story published. Once it was published, theoretically at least his life would be saved because the secret would be out and the spotlight would be on the bad guy. That strategy had always made sense to me, but in May 2001 two stories had been published by respected magazines within the span of six days, and it hadn’t done any good at all. For some reason I just couldn’t figure out, journalists didn’t seem to understand the magnitude of this story. Through the years Mike Ocrant had been approached several times by journalists from various publications who were interested in pursuing the story. But mostly they wanted him to hand it to them. Mike, who had left journalism in 2003, had continued to urge other