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

Journal published Greg Zuckerman’s story, “Madoff Misled SEC in ‘06, Got Off.” The second paragraph began, “Harry Markopolos—who once worked for a Madoff rival—sparked the probe with his nearly decade-long campaign to persuade the SEC that Mr. Madoff’s returns were too good to be true. In recent days, the Wall Street Journal reviewed e-mails, letters, and other documents that Mr. Markopolos shared with the SEC over the years.

“When he first began studying Mr. Madoff’s investment performance a decade ago, Mr. Markopolos told a colleague at the time, ‘It doesn’t make any damn sense,’ he and the colleague recall. ‘This has to be a Ponzi scheme.”’

We had decided at this point not to name the other members of the team, although Zuckerman had spoken to both Neil and Frank.

The article continued, “The SEC’s documents indicate the agency had Mr. Madoff in its sights amid multiple violations that, if pursued, could have blown open his alleged multibillion-dollar scam. Instead his firm registered as an investment advisor, at the agency’s request, and the public got no word of the violations.

“For Mr. Markopolos, the arrest a few days ago of Mr. Madoff was something of a vindication after his long campaign. At a certain point, he says, ‘I was just the boy who cried wolf.”’

Zuckerman’s lengthy story covered the entire eight-year-long investigation, from the day I got Madoff’s returns through all my dealings with the SEC. He quoted me as saying, “Some people play fantasy sports; that was how it was with us—Madoff was our fantasy sport. We wanted him nailed.”

As for the response from the SEC, Zuckerman wrote, “An SEC spokesman wouldn’t comment on the agency’s communication with Mr. Markopolos.” And later in the story, after describing my final submission to the director of risk management, he added, “Mr. Sokobin, through an SEC spokesman, declined to comment.”

Well before dawn the next morning, I quietly left my home and took the first train into Boston. I didn’t want to be at my house, because I knew the media would have it surrounded shortly after daybreak. It was an emotional day for me. I’d just lifted the world off my shoulders, and I spent the day moving around the city simply thanking all the people who had contributed to the investigation—my lawyers; friends like Dan DiBartolomeo; Andre Mehta at Cambridge Associates, the most prestigious consulting firm in the world; and the staff at the Boston Security Analysts Society. It was a victory for all of us.

The one person whose hand I really wanted to shake was Ed Manion’s, but I figured I probably wouldn’t be welcome at that particular office.

We’d won the biggest battle, but we hadn’t won the war. I believed the SEC remained a serious danger to the American people. It was obvious that it was no longer capable of regulating the financial industry, and unless it was completely transformed it would never be able to do that. It wasn’t just a few cosmetic changes that were necessary. It wasn’t just a few scapegoats who needed to be replaced. The SEC had to be fundamentally changed if investors were ever going to be able to rely on it again.

The damage done by Madoff was reverberating throughout the financial markets of the world, as well as in millions of homes. In an instant, thousands of people had been financially devastated. Their investments were wiped out. Within days stories began appearing in the media about elderly people who had been living on their regular returns from Bernie who were left with nothing. Houses were going up for sale in an already distressed real estate market. The entire hedge fund industry was shaken.

The media coverage was insatiable. They were reporting how many people had been wiped out, which we had totally missed. We had never realized that Madoff was accepting individual accounts. I didn’t know he was taking Jewish charities and Jewish endowments to the cleaners, just wiping them out. We were tracking the feeder funds, and as finance professionals, Neil, Mike, Frank, and I couldn’t conceive of anybody putting 100 percent in a single investment. That’s just not in our vocabulary. We thought by tracking the feeder funds we were tracking Madoff. We weren’t dealing with individuals; we were focused on large funds. And maybe that was the luckiest break in our investigation, because if we had found out it might have gotten us killed.

The problem for reporters was that there were few people other than the victims to speak to. They couldn’t get to Bernie Madoff or any members of his family. That pretty much left me. I was getting what seemed like hundreds of requests every day. I turned down every offer; in fact, a Hollywood-based agent called and told me a producer had offered me $1 million to appear on Oprah. I don’t have the slightest idea if that was a real offer or what other rights it might have included. It certainly seemed like too big a number to be real but I never pursued it. “I’m not interested,” I said. “It’s not appropriate.” I didn’t want to be seen as profiting from my work; and Oprah certainly was not the right forum. I made the decision that I would tell my story on only one TV program; and if I was going to do only one show, I wanted it to be a serious investigative program with the most extensive coverage possible. So I accepted an invitation to appear on 60 Minutes.

But because I wanted to keep control of the story, I asked the members of my team, as well as friends like Dave Henry and Dan DiBartolomeo, to do the interviews. Frank Casey, in particular, was deluged with requests. He did numerous interviews; and as he quickly discovered, many of the reporters covering this story had no background in finance; they didn’t know the difference between a split-strike conversion and a two-point conversion. But he patiently answered their questions.

In addition to all the invitations from the media,