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

bothersome outsider. I was some quant from Boston nobody had ever heard of. For those insiders, the people who knew Bernie personally, who took pride when he acknowledged them at restaurants and openings, the people who invested their own money or their clients’ money with him, for those people to admit that Bernie was a fraud meant admitting that everything they believed in was questionable. Maybe even worse, if some skinny guy who wasn’t even from New York could look at a few documents and figure out in five minutes that Madoff was a fraud, how could they have missed it for so many years? Or just as likely, how could they have known about it and never tried to stop it while thousands of people lost billions of dollars? So it was easier just to hope I went away. I mean, what could happen?

The team kept me going through this endless series of disappointments. In our conversations we’d make jokes about the incompetence of the SEC, about Bernie’s ability to continue to bring in new money, about the fact that we could see that the emperor was stark naked.

But as a result of this latest failure, as well as the fact that I was also working on as many as a dozen other cases of fraud, each of them involving more than a billion dollars, I increased my electronic security. Actually, only a few of those cases were financial frauds; most of them were medical frauds. It was very exciting work and I loved the challenge, but I had encountered a problem in my new career as a fraud investigator that I hadn’t anticipated and didn’t know how to solve. It was pretty basic: How was I going to earn a living? I wasn’t going to earn any money from my investigative work until one of my False Claims Act cases settled. And based on history, it could take several more years before that happened. Faith was amazingly supportive; she never complained, but it really bothered me that we had become so dependent on her salary. I just couldn’t figure out how to make this business profitable.

There was no one I could turn to for advice. As I had learned, while there were other fraud investigators, there was no precedent for what I was doing. The law firms that routinely did False Claims Act cases would work directly with the whistleblower, and the statute provides for the whistleblower to get compensated from the bounty; the legal advisers would receive a percentage of that payment. But I wasn’t a whistleblower.

Law firms are also permitted to hire consultants and pay them a fee, but I didn’t have a law degree, so I couldn’t be a legal consultant, and generally the law firm approached and hired consultants rather than consultants approaching the firm. But I was initiating the contact with law firms.

And law firms are not permitted to pay referral fees or share revenue from cases with nonlawyers. So we couldn’t simply make a deal to share whatever monies we received.

The statute simply hadn’t anticipated someone like me. I was preparing the entire case; I was discovering the fraud, researching it, recruiting whistleblowers, conducting my own investigation, and compiling the evidence needed for conviction. And finally I would hand it over to an attorney to guide it through the legal system and collect the bounty.

I had spoken with several lawyers, and none of them could figure out how to make that fit in the existing structure of the False Claims Act.

I began to solve that problem one evening in August, when I attended the Cambridge Chamber of Commerce’s Summer Bash. It was held at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, which was located not too far from MIT. So for $50 you got drinks, a world-class dinner, and the opportunity to meet some of the smartest people in the world. For me, meetings like this one were very good places to network; I particularly wanted to meet people from the pharmaceutical world, which I had discovered was ripe with fraud. As I had learned in my investigations, the health care industry makes Wall Street look honest. It’s a $2-trillion-a-year business with no controls and with limited auditing. On Wall Street the crooks at least have the decency to try to hide their frauds, but those people cheating Medicare don’t even bother doing that. Wall Street is only taking your life savings, but in health care they may be stealing your life. I was surprised to discover how little “care” there is in health care. It’s obviously no surprise that the pharmaceutical industry is a completely profit-driven business, but the methods companies devised to earn some of those profits were surprising—and in the case I discovered, illegal.

I’ve been working on several cases that remain under investigation or under seal, meaning in both cases I can’t discuss them. Truthfully, my career aspiration is to prove that a drug with more than a billion dollars in annual sales is actually killing Americans and citizens across the globe, that in the clinical trials the dangers of this drug were revealed, and that the executives knew about the dangers and went ahead and marketed it anyway. I’ve been working on this case for a few years now without much success, but I hope someday I’ll be able to find a key witness and get this case filed with the Department of Justice.

There was a large crowd at the Summer Bash, but I noticed a small, attractive woman involved in a very intense conversation with several people I knew. Eventually we were standing in the same group. I introduced myself to her, and she told me her name was Gaytri Kachroo.

I wasn’t sure I’d heard that correctly. She smiled and repeated it: “Gaytri Kachroo.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

She replied, “I’m Gaytri, the Hindu goddess of wisdom and knowledge.”

Well. Now that was an unusual introduction, I thought. Actually, Gaytri Kachroo explained, she was an attorney—with five law degrees, including a