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

master’s and a doctorate in law from the Harvard Law School. She had been born in Srinagar, Kashmir India, had grown up in the middle of a war, and had moved with her family to Montreal in 1971. At the time we met she was serving as general counsel to a number of small firms both in the United States and abroad. I told her, “I have to be honest. I don’t like lawyers.”

“Neither do I,” she agreed.

During this conversation I told her that I had a unique problem. I was a full-time financial fraud investigator but I couldn’t figure out how to earn any money doing it. I could find cases, and I could investigate them and hand over my evidence to law firms that could bring them to the government under the False Claims Act and earn many millions of dollars from the settlements—but I had been told by several attorneys that law firms were legally not permitted to pay what was basically a finder’s fee or a referral fee to people who brought cases to them. In other words, they couldn’t pay me for my work.

Somehow, I needed to create a new business model that would enable me to earn a living uncovering fraud.

Gaytri didn’t equivocate. “Whoever’s telling you that doesn’t know what they’re talking about,” she said. “Most lawyers believe that because they’re trained in old case law and don’t think in the future. I know what you’re doing is amazing. You’re making the cases that count from the ground up and possibly new case law.” She thought about it, then nodded. “I’m sure with a little thought we can figure this out. What you’re doing is a good thing. And since the outcome is legal, I can’t imagine there isn’t a legal solution. I’m sure I can figure out a way to make that structure work and I can make it legal.”

We sat down in her office the next day to try to create a business model that would work. I explained to her that at the behest of the Boston office of the SEC I had filed several market-timing cases. I specifically did not mention Madoff to her. In fact, she knew nothing about it until December 11, 2008; when Madoff’s arrest was announced I called and told her that I was the Madoff whistleblower they were talking about on television. So when we began working together, there was no way for me to predict that she would become the fifth member of the team.

As I eventually discovered, Gaytri was as unusual as her name. She was raised in war as India and Pakistan fought over Kashmir. As a child she remembered hiding in the bomb shelter in her backyard as bombs dropped around her “like thunder and lightning.” She had faced terror early in her life, so standing up to the SEC was not going to scare her. Her father was a mathematician recruited by Montreal’s McGill University in 1965; the rest of her family—her mother, herself, and two brothers—had moved to Montreal almost six years later.

Her father was extremely controlling. Because he was afraid that his children would fall prey to western culture, he tried hard to shield them. As she told me one night, “It was important to him that we kept our roots, although he also stressed that we should experience the best of both cultures.” Growing up, though, Gaytri was not allowed to have friends outside of school, and when she went to Wellesley College, a women’s school, she actually was chaperoned by her brother, who was at MIT. Although she had been trained in mathematics at home, she rebelled, and rather than math or science, got her initial degree in studio arts and fine arts. After graduating, she ran away with a man she had been seeing secretly, whom she would later marry. During this dramatic escape from home she climbed out of a first-floor window as her boyfriend waited below, got on a bus, and tried to get away. Her brother, who was chaperoning her, jumped on the bus while her mother followed in her car. When the bus finally stopped at a café, the police were called and permitted Gaytri to leave.

Eventually the couple married and had two children, while Gaytri was getting her legal degrees from the University of Ottawa and McGill University. Eventually, she left the security of her marriage and returned to the United States with her young children. Enrolling at Harvard Law School, she became the first single parent to get a master’s and doctorate in law.

By the time I met her, she had worked as a civil prosecutor in Canada and for several of the most prestigious law firms in Canada and the United States, and was busy establishing her own international practice. It was not until we started working on my congressional testimony together that she told me that as a child of 15 she had tied the World Chess Champion, Anatoly Karpov, in a chess game.

After what she had been through, absolutely nothing fazed her, although when we first started talking it’s doubtful she envisioned sitting next to me in front of Congress as we attacked the SEC.

Initially Gaytri had only the vaguest knowledge about the False Claims Act, so she began by reading it, as well as the case law that had developed from it. We discussed numerous different possibilities—one of them even included me going to law school so I would qualify for a bounty. That one I rejected immediately. Truthfully, it had not even occurred to me that it was possible to earn an income from my work other than the reward money. But eventually we worked out a novel approach to my problem: After I had gathered enough evidence to believe a fraud was being committed, I would approach a law firm—there are firms around the country that specialize in this type of work—and if the lawyers were interested in pursuing it they would hire