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

Even though he obviously wasn’t interested, I was not above turning our brief conversation into something just short of a death-bed promise. I e-mailed John Wilke and explained, “If you guys don’t want it, Ben Stein over at Barron’s said he’d take it.”

I got an immediate response. Of course the Journal wants it, Wilke wrote. And we set up another date to get together. He was going to come to Boston and get started on the story.

John Wilke and I continued dancing together. He was always just about ready to start working on the story, and then something always came up. In November, I sent an update to the team, and I can still read my hope and my optimism in my e-mail: “Because the reporter, John Wilke, did all of those front-page WSJ articles on Congressional corruption, he wasn’t able to get to Madoff. The 3 Congressmen (2 Republicans and 1 Democrat) he exposed are all being investigated by the FBI. He and I just talked on a different front-page story he’s doing in December that I gave him. John told me that his editor has read my Madoff analysis and is very, very excited to start their investigation in January....

“He said that his editor thinks that hedge fund scrutiny will increase now that the Democrats are in power and greenlighted John’s investigation starting in January. I guess we’ll wait and see what transpires. I’ll keep you posted. This guy does top shelf corruption stories, but everything he investigates is on a schedule.”

I continued to speak with John regularly. That other story I referred to was about one of my investigations, which we finally agreed to postpone until there was an indictment. But in those conversations I suddenly began to hear his interest in the Madoff investigation waning. Something was going on, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. For the first time he began talking about needing “a new angle, something different from what’s been already written.” In February 2007, I sent the team an e-mail admitting, “The Wall Street Journal’s John Wilke has been a big disappointment. Obviously they were the wrong choice. Eventually Bernie will blow up and everybody will say, ‘I told you so.’ Feel free to buy 45-day maturity, 5% out-of-the-money puts once the first news of the Madoff blowup comes out. I suspect he’ll be considered the Enron of hedge funds.”

I don’t know if I was more disappointed or confused, but more than either one, I was scared. There was never a moment I doubted John Wilke’s honesty or commitment. We spoke too often for me to ever believe he was just stringing me along, but clearly something (or someone) had happened at the Journal to prevent him from doing this story. If he wasn’t interested in this story, all he had to do was tell me he’d decided not to pursue it for whatever reasons. But he never did that. Until he began peppering our conversations with the need for a new angle, he had never even indicated there was any problem at all. It was always next week or next month. The only assumption I could make was that one of his editors—or perhaps the Dow Jones lawyers—had stopped him. In my mind, at least, I was convinced that someone high up at the Journal had decided it was too dangerous to go after Bernie Madoff.

The question I wrestled with for a long time was: Why? When the newspaper that existed only to cover the financial world was handed a detailed explanation of the biggest fraud in Wall Street history, why wouldn’t someone at least conduct a cursory investigation? Three phone calls, two phone calls, that’s all it would have taken to verify that I wasn’t some kind of nut, that the accusations I was making were based on fact. A half hour, that’s all. Instead, Wilke spent more than a year making commitments that he never fulfilled. Of course it occurred to me that Madoff might have a good contact at the paper and was able to convince them there was nothing to this story. And more frightening, considering that I was already worried that the SEC had revealed my identity, was the possibility that whoever had killed the story at the journal had leaked my name to Madoff.

I never blamed John Wilke. John was phenomenal; he was aces. I didn’t even blame the Journal; in fact, after Madoff went down I again handed the Journal the story it could have published three years and tens of billions of dollars earlier. I never found out why the Journal had not done the story.

While I spoke with John regularly about my other cases, we carefully avoided talking about Madoff. I was very busy with my other cases; I knew that John could be of great importance to me, and he knew that I was a credible source of important stories. We talked about the other cases I was working on, with Madoff silently between us. Pat Burns trusted him completely, so I did, too. Unfortunately, terribly, in October 2008 John was diagnosed with a very aggressive form of pancreatic cancer. He died in May 2009.

After it was clear the journal was not going to investigate Madoff, I didn’t know where else to turn. The government had proven to be willfully blind to Madoff, and now my attempt to bring the case to the attention of the public had failed. I had been working on this for too many years, and I was finally beginning to consider the possibility that Bernie Madoff was untouchable—that he was simply too powerful to be brought down. Not only because he had billions of dollars and knew the most important people in the industry and could make or break careers, but because he was a pillar of the financial industry. If he was a fraud, it brought into question everything these people believed in. Bernie Madoff was the ultimate insider; I was the