No One Would Listen E-Book

Harry Markopolos

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 672

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Harry Markopolos and his team of financial sleuths discuss first-hand how they cracked the Madoff Ponzi scheme

No One Would Listen is the thrilling story of how the Harry Markopolos, a little-known number cruncher from a Boston equity derivatives firm, and his investigative team uncovered Bernie Madoff's scam years before it made headlines, and how they desperately tried to warn the government, the industry, and the financial press.

Page by page, Markopolos details his pursuit of the greatest financial criminal in history, and reveals the massive fraud, governmental incompetence, and criminal collusion that has changed thousands of lives forever-as well as the world's financial system.

• The only book to tell the story of Madoff's scam and the SEC's failings by those who saw both first hand
• Describes how Madoff was enabled by investors and fiduciaries alike
• Discusses how the SEC missed the red flags raised by Markopolos

Despite repeated written and verbal warnings to the SEC by Harry Markopolos, Bernie Madoff was allowed to continue his operations. No One Would Listen paints a vivid portrait of Markopolos and his determined team of financial sleuths, and what impact Madoff's scam will have on financial markets and regulation for decades to come.

Leseprobe

Contents

Foreword

Who’s Who

Introduction

Chapter 1: A Red Wagon in a Field of Snow

Chapter 2: The Slot Machine That Kept Coming Up Cherries

Chapter 3: Falling Down the Rabbit Hole

Chapter 4: Finding More Peters (to Pay Paul)

Chapter 5: The Goddess of Justice Wears a Blindfold

Chapter 6: Didn’t Anyone Want a Pulitzer?

Chapter 7: More Red Flags Than the Soviet Union

Chapter 8: Closing the Biggest Barn Door in Wall Street History

Chapter 9: Soaring Like an Eagle Surrounded by Turkeys

Epilogue: Mr. Pinkslip Goes to Washington

Appendix A: Madoff Tops Charts; Skeptics Ask How

Appendix B: The World’s Largest Hedge Fund Is a Fraud

Appendix C: Online Resource Guide for the Classroom and Beyond

A Note on Sources

About the Author

Acknowledgments

Index

Inerts

Copyright © 2010 by Fox Hounds, LLC. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Markopolos, Harry.

No one would listen : a true financial thriller / Harry Markopolos.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-470-55373-2 (cloth)

1. Madoff, Bernard L. 2. Ponzi schemes—United States. 3. Investment advisors—Corrupt practices—United States. 4. Hedge funds—United States. 5. Securities fraud—United States—Prevention. 6. United States. Securities and Exchange Commission—Rules and practice. I. Title.

HV6697.M37 2010

364.16'3092—dc22

2009049433

To all the victims—you above all others deserve to know the truth.

Foreword

Harry Markopolos is a hero.

But not for anything he meant to do. He did not stop Bernie Madoff from creating the largest Ponzi scheme of all time; nor did he save Madoff’s investors any money.

What he did do was create a clearly documented record of his warnings so that when Madoff’s scheme eventually toppled under its own weight, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which was charged with stopping fraud and protecting investors, could not assume an ostrich defense.

Ponzi schemes exist in stable disequilibrium. This means that while they can’t ultimately succeed, they can persist indefinitely—until they don’t. Just the fact that something has gone on for a very long time doesn’t mean it’s legitimate. Madoff’s story shows that investors are attracted to too-good-to-be-true situations despite the red flags. How statistically different was Bernie Madoff’s track record from General Electric’s 100-quarter record of continual earnings growth or Cisco’s 13-quarter record of beating analysts’ quarterly estimates by exactly one penny per share between 1998 and 2001? Madoff’s record was clearly implausible and, therefore, raised the question of what was wrong. The question is: Do we draw the line at Ponzi schemes or do we do something about less clear-cut manipulations as well?

One time I pointed out to a Wall Street analyst that a certain company was cooking the books. The analyst responded that it made him more confident in his bullish recommendation because such a company would never disappoint Wall Street.

For years, I observed and experienced the SEC protecting large perpetrators of abuse at the expense of the investors whom the SEC is supposed to protect. The SEC has been very tough, and usually appropriately so, on small-time cons, promoters, insider traders, and, yes, hedge funds. But when it comes to large corporations and institutionalized Wall Street, the SEC uses kid gloves, imposes meaningless nondeterring fines, and emphasizes relatively unimportant things like record keeping rather than the substance of important things—like investors being swindled.

Bernie Madoff epitomized the problem. When he was legit, Madoff was a large broker-dealer and the former chairman of NASDAQ. He was not famous as a money manager, let alone as a hedge fund manager, because he wasn’t one. After his scheme collapsed and he became known as a crook, he was rechristened as a hedge fund operator—even though, to this day, his was the only so-called hedge fund I’ve heard of that didn’t charge a management fee or an incentive fee. I doubt he would have fooled the SEC had he been known as a hedge fund manager, as the SEC would’ve been predisposed to catch him if they had known him with that title.

Warren Buffett said, “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.” The financial crisis of 2008 revealed many, including Madoff, to be inappropriately attired. Effective regulation must mean that the skinny-dippers are stopped while the tide is still in.

As you will see, the SEC has taken some steps toward reform, and Harry Markopolos is optimistic that the agency will do better. I’d hold off judgment until the SEC brings cases that matter against large corporations that haven’t gone bankrupt (taking action before the money is lost) and against institutionalized Wall Street.

The silver lining in the Madoff collapse, if there could be such a thing, is that for at least one moment in time, the SEC has been exposed. And for his role in making that happen, Harry Markopolos deserves all of our thanks.

David Einhorn

December 2009

Who’s Who

Investigation Team and Advisers

Frank Casey

Neil Chelo CFA, CAIA, FRM

Gaytri Kachroo, personal attorney

Harry Markopolos CFA, CFE

Phil Michael, qui tam (whistleblower) attorney

Michael Ocrant

Madoff and Advisers

Nicole DeBello, Madoff’s attorney

Bernard Madoff, founder, Madoff Investment Securities LLC

Ira Lee Sorkin, Madoff’s attorney

Wall Street Feeder Funds

Access International Advisors and Marketers

Francois de Flaghac, marketing

Patrick Littaye, Founder

Prince Michel of Yugoslavia, marketing

Tim Ng, junior partner (and husband of Debbi Hootman)

Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, Chief Executive Officer

Fairfield Greenwich Group

Douglas Reid, Managing Director

Amit Vijayvergiya, Chief Risk Officer

Financial Wizards and Wall Street Brains

Dan DiBartolomeo, Founder, Northfield Information Services

Jeff Fritz, Oxford Trading Associates

Leon Gross, Head of Equity Derivatives Research, CitiGroup

Andre Mehta, CFA, super-quant and Managing Director of Alternative Investments at Cambridge Associates

Chuck Werner, math wizard from MIT

Markopolos’s Friends and Colleagues

Harry Bates, sergeant, Whitman, Massachusetts, Police Department

Pat Burns, Director of Communications, Taxpayers Against Fraud (whistleblower organization)

Boyd Cook, major general in the National Guard, Maryland dairy farmer

George Devoe, CFA, Chief Investment Officer, Rampart Investment Management Company

Elaine Drosos and family, owners of the Venus Cafe in Whitman, Massachusetts

Dave Fraley, managing partner, Rampart Investment Management Company

Scott Franzblau, Principal, Benchmark Plus

Bud Haslett, CFA, Chief Option Strategist, Miller Tabak Securities

Dave Henry, CFA, Chief Investment Officer, DKH Investments in Boston, Massachusetts

Chuck Hill, CFA, succeeded Markopolos as president of the Boston Security Analysts Society

Daniel E. Holland III, Managing Director, Goldman Sachs in Boston

Debbi Hootman, Darien Capital Management

Greg Hryb, CFA, Darien Capital Management

Louie Markopolos, Harry’s younger brother

Matt Moran, Vice President of Marketing, Chicago Board Options Exchange

Peter Scannell, Putnam Investments’ Quincy employee who filed a claim with the Securities and Exchange Commission

Rudi Schadt, PhD, Director of Risk Management, Oppenheimer Funds

Diane Schulman, False Claims Act fraud investigator

Jeb White, President, Taxpayers Against Fraud

Burt Winnick, Managing Partner, McCarter & English in Boston

Bill Zucker, attorney, McCarter & English

Journalists

Erin Arvedlund, Barron’s magazine reporter

Reuben Heyman-Kantor, 60 Minutes

Andy Court, 60 Minutes

John “Front Page” Wilke, Wall Street Journal reporter

Greg Zuckerman, Wall Street Journal reporter

Government Officials

Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)

David Becker, General Counsel

Steve Cohen, attorney

Christopher Cox, former Chairman

David Fielder, Assistant Inspector General

Noelle Frangipane, Deputy Inspector General

Robert Khuzami, current Director of Enforcement

David Kotz, Inspector General

Lori Richards, former Director, Office of Compliance, Inspections and Examinations

Mary Schapiro, current Chairman

Jonathan Sokobin, Deputy Chief Economist, Office of Economic Analysis, and Director of Risk Management

Heidi Steiber, Senior Counsel

Linda Thomsen, former Director of Enforcement

Andrew Vollmer, former Acting General Counsel

John Walsh, Chief Counsel, Office of Compliance, Inspections and Examinations

Chris Wilson, Senior Counsel

David Witherspoon, Senior Counsel

Boston Regional Office

Jim Adelman, former senior enforcement attorney

David Bergers, former New England Regional Director of Enforcement, who replaced Grant Ward, current Regional Administrator

Michael Garrity, Assistant Regional Director

Edward Manion, Senior Staff Accountant

Juan Marcelino, former Regional Administrator

Joseph Mick, Assistant Regional Director

Walter Ricciardi, former Regional Administrator

Grant Ward, former New England Regional Director of Enforcement

Northeast Regional Office in New York

Doria Bachenheimer, Assistant Director of Enforcement

Meaghan Cheung, Branch Chief

Peter Lamoure

Simona Suh, enforcement attorney

Senate

Jeff Merkley (D-OR)

Chuck Schumer (D-NY)

House of Representatives

Gary Ackerman (D-NY)

Shelly Capito (R-WV)

Joe Donnelly (D-IN)

Barney Frank (D-MA), Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee

Scott Garrett (R-NJ), Ranking Member, House Capital Markets Subcommittee

Al Green (D-TX)

Paul Kanjorski (D-PA), Chairman of the House Capital Markets Subcommittee

Carolyn Maloney (D-NY)

James Segel, Special Counsel to the House Financial Services Committee

Brad Sherman (D-CA)

Other

Andrew Cuomo, current New York State Attorney General

William Galvin, Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth

Eliot Spitzer, former New York State Attorney General

Kathleen Teahan (D, Plymouth), Markopolos’s former local Massachusetts state representative

Introduction to the Paperback Edition

I lead a very busy life. I’m involved in several investigations of the financial industry that will shock people when, and if, they become public. The “if,” of course, is the result of my experience in the Madoff case, when so many individuals and institutions simply chose to ignore the facts in front of them. However, these investigations are what matter to me now. I have made several speeches about our Madoff investigation, mostly to professional organizations, but it has reached the point where I really don’t enjoy talking about it anymore. Fortunately, it is in my rearview mirror. Unfortunately, that’s not true for most of us.

We’re going to be living with Bernie Madoff for the rest of our lives. He has become so much a part of our culture that he has achieved a certain kind of infamy—his name has become a metaphor for a brilliant and heartless criminal, while his face has become a popular and instantly recognizable Halloween mask. This is a story that will have an impact for generations and still produces frequent headlines in the news: Madoff got beaten up in prison; Madoff’s son commits suicide and his body goes unclaimed; the victims’ trustee, Irving Picard, files another lawsuit; another formerly exclusive golf club has been put up for sale because too many of its members lost too much money; an auction of Madoff’s personal belongings grosses $2 million—including $6,100 for slippers with his initials embroidered in gold thread. But for me, of course, and the Fox Hounds, Bernie Madoff will always be the one who got away.

In the months since the initial publication of this book there have been substantial and significant actions. On paper, Madoff defrauded an estimated three million investors of $64.8 billion, although his records included only 5,000 direct accounts. Obviously, $64.8 billion is an arbitrary number, as there are several different ways of calculating the losses. But any conversation about Madoff has to begin with the fates of the victims. I’ve come to believe that there are far more victims than anyone has speculated. I actually didn’t appreciate how depraved a human being Bernie Madoff was until I began meeting a few of those victims. I’ve been invited to make many speeches, and each time I do I meet victims. I’ve heard too many stories about people who have committed or attempted suicide, or who died of heartbreak or stress, after losing much or all of their life savings to Madoff. In addition to the 339 funds of funds in more than 40 countries we know about, I’ve learned of consolidators who put together large groups of small investors and delivered their money to established funds that invested with Madoff. After one TV interview, the host of a major news program whispered to me, “Harry, there are a lot of victims here.” It turned out that almost all of the camera operators had lost their life savings.

That surprised me. Madoff almost exclusively accepted large investors and, while technicians make a comfortable salary, they don’t have millions of dollars to invest. The host explained that they had been approached by a consolidator who pooled their savings and gave it to a fund of funds. They’d lost everything—but only the name of the consolidator appeared on the long list of victims. I heard similar stories several different times, meaning at least some of the names on the victims list actually represented multiple investors.

It’s clear now that some people will get some money back. Who and how much is another question. Initially one investor who had lost several million dollars was offered 10 percent of the value of his loss by a syndicate trying to buy debt in the event there is money returned. Recently that same person was offered as much as 35 percent of his claim, so obviously there are people who believe that eventually there will be a significant payout. In fact, by the end of 2010 it appeared investors whose claims had been approved might receive as much as half of their investments minus what they already had received.

European victims have fared much better than Americans. According to reports, a group of European banks that sold Madoff-linked financial products to their clients have agreed to pay $15.5 billion to an estimated 720,000 Madoff investors. Supposedly that represents the entire amount those clients had invested, but not the profits Madoff had reported to them. About 20 percent of all European investors have chosen to file their own lawsuits. Not all European banks or funds of funds are participating, but it’s still a much better settlement than anything offered thus far to American investors. The fact that the banks settled isn’t surprising; the European investors included the wealthiest and most powerful citizens in those countries—among them some royals—and they had a lot of clout with those banks.

It also seems clear at least some of those banks had doubts about Madoff. ABC News reported that JP Morgan’s London office filed a “Suspicious Activity Report” with UK authorities two months prior to Madoff’s arrest claiming his returns were most likely fraudulent. Morgan already had begun withdrawing investments from feeder funds dealing with Madoff, which caused an advisor to one of those funds to threaten a Morgan representative that the fund’s “Colombian friends” could “create havoc.”

These “friends,” obviously drug lords, as well as Russian Mafia and other criminals who had invested tens of millions of dollars, were precisely the people I was so concerned about when we began blowing the whistle on Madoff.

In this country the court-appointed trustee, Irving Picard, has reviewed more than 16,000 claims for repayment of losses. Picard is in a very difficult situation but he is doing an extraordinary job. He’s decided that profits on paper aren’t legitimate and has rejected all those claims. He’s also decided that those people who took out an amount equal to or greater than the money they actually put in won’t receive any funds. Taking everything into consideration, he has found that only about 2,300 of the claims, worth $5.58 billion, are valid.

The question is how much money Picard will eventually be able to claw back or recover. By the end of 2010 he had recovered about $3 billion, and had reached an additional $7.2 billion settlement with the estate of the late investor Jeffrey Picower. Picower was one of Madoff’s largest investors and had received those funds in excess of his investments. Picard also had filed civil suits against Madoff’s family, investment funds, and wealthy investors, seeking an additional $48 billion. In November he brought a $2 billion lawsuit against UBS AG, accusing that bank and its related entities of 23 counts of financial fraud, pointing out, “Madoff’s scheme could not have been accomplished unless UBS had agreed not only to look the other way, but also to pretend that they were truly ensuring the existence of assets and trades when in fact they were not and never did.” In early December, he sued JPMorgan Chase for $6.4 billion, and Sonja Kohn’s Bank Medici for $19.6 billion—but asking the courts to treble the Kohn figure under racketeering statutes. When filing those charges he referred to Kohn as Madoff’s “criminal soul mate.”

All of these entities have denied his charges. For example, Morgan’s spokesperson said the lawsuit “blatantly distorts both the facts and the law in an attempt to grab headlines,” and the bank will defend itself vigor-ously.” But it does seem clear that many of these banks and funds knew Madoff was a fraud, if not a Ponzi scheme. The Financial Times reported in December that several banks, as well as Access International, had been warned of serious problems. A specialist brought in by that fund warned after four days of investigation, “If this were a new investment product not only would it fail to meet due dil standards you would likely shove it out the door . . . EITHER extremely sloppy errors OR serious omissions in tickets.” By the time Picard is done, he estimates he could end up filing lawsuits against as many as 1,000 investors he describes as “net winners.” Those are “the people who made money, who got more, have made money at the expense of the people who didn’t.”

Unfortunately, at least some of those net winners are elderly people who were duped by Madoff or investment funds, people who were dependent on the returns they got from him and are now living on whatever they have left. So what do you do about those people? Do you take their remaining money and leave them destitute? It’s difficult not to be sympathetic; I’ve met several people who have already lost most of their life savings and are terrified the trustee will be able to claw back what they have left.

It’s a lot easier to go after those people who walked away from Madoff with a fortune. The question that I have been asked more often than any other is: Do I think Madoff’s family knew what he was doing? Certainly Irving Picard does, claiming that the family used Madoff’s Ponzi scheme as “a family piggy bank.” In July 2010 he sued three businesses controlled by Madoff’s sons and other family members to recover more than $30 million. In his court papers Picard wrote that Madoff family members spent as much as $200 million for their own purposes. “Foremost among the recipients of Madoff’s gifts of customer funds were his closest family members, including his wife Ruth Madoff, his brother Peter, his two sons Andrew and Mark, and his niece Shana.” In November 2010 Picard filed 40 lawsuits against family members and former employees of the firm seeking to recover $69 million that was fraudently transferred to these people. In addition, Madoff’s former secretary and the woman who handled daily cash balances were arrested and charged with conspiracy, securities fraud, and falsifying records.

And in December 2010 Mark Madoff committed suicide in his $6 million apartment, writing despairingly that “No one wants to hear the truth,” as his two-year-old child slept in the next room. Unfortunately, I suspect this will not be the last death directly attributable to Bernie Madoff.

In response to the public outrage, and perhaps to my testimony, the government has taken steps to encourage whistleblowers. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which was part of the regulatory overhaul signed into law by President Obama in July 2010, specifically increased the potential reward to whistleblowers who provide “original information” from 10 percent up to 30 percent of any successful enforcement action that exceeds $1 million. Even while the precise details of the program were still being hammered out in Congress, plaintiff law firms began advertising on radio and in the newspapers for whistleblowers. While it is still rare for a bounty to be paid, with fines in the tens of millions of dollars these cases can be far more lucrative than the normal slip-and-falls many of these firms han-dle. As one Washington firm offered, “If you are aware of any securities or tax law violations and would like to discuss the SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission], CFTC [Commodity Futures Trading Commission], or IRS whistleblower programs with a [name of firm] attorney at no charge, please contact us.”

Obviously a lot of major corporations are nervous about this new regulation, as perhaps they should be. In October 2010, attorneys representing several major financial, pharmaceutical, and big-box companies asked the SEC to force employees to bring any accusations to the firm before taking them to the agency. In addition, they asked the SEC to refuse to accept charges from those people with “fiduciary responsibility” to the company, basically executives and directors.

It’s actually pretty funny: The SEC is finally ready to show some teeth—and these firms are asking the agency to have those teeth pulled. Until the final regulations are promulgated, it’s impossible to know how weak or strong they will be. A lot of people are watching.

The only member of the Fox Hounds still actively working on the Madoff case is Gaytri Kachroo. She was invited to speak in front of the World Legal Forum in The Hague about the problems facing investors trying to make claims concerning financial frauds across national borders. She has served as the vice-chair of the Global Alliance on the Madoff case (a civil society of about 5,000 lawyers from 28 countries), which has led to international discussions about how to deal with multinational financial frauds. She also is actively representing many Madoff investors in their negotiations with Irving Picard, and in their potential lawsuits against the SEC. It’s an extraordinarily complex situation, and it isn’t going to be resolved quickly or to the satisfaction of most of the people who have suffered damages.

For the rest of Fox Hounds—Neil, Frank, Mike, and me—the Madoff case remains the superglue that bonded us together, but it long ago ceased to be part of our daily or weekly lives. Unless there is a story in the papers, we rarely even discuss it. We get up in the morning and, unlike Madoff or many of his victims, we simply move forward with our normal lives. And having once been so close to pure evil, we are enjoying every minute of normality.

Introduction

On the rainy afternoon of June 17, 2009, David Kotz sat patiently in a small room with a single barred window at the Metropolitan Correction Center, a prison in lower Manhattan, waiting to interview Bernard Madoff, the mastermind behind the greatest financial crime in history. Kotz, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) inspector general, was investigating the total failure of his agency to expose Madoff’s $65 billion Ponzi scheme—even after I’d warned the SEC about it in five separate submissions over a nine-year period.

Kotz and his deputy, Noelle Frangipane, sat across from an empty chair, and on either side of it sat Madoff’s two attorneys, Ira Lee Sorkin and Nicole DeBello. Eventually Madoff was escorted into the room by a guard, who carefully unlocked and removed his handcuffs. Bernie Madoff had been a king of the financial industry, the widely respected cofounder and former chairman of NASDAQ, the owner of one of Wall Street’s most successful broker-dealers, and a prominent New York philanthropist. Now, wearing a bright orange prison jumpsuit that glared against the drab gray walls of the room, he sat down between his impeccably dressed lawyers.

Madoff had agreed to this interview with the single stipulation that it not be taped or transcribed. Kotz began by explaining to Madoff that he had a legal obligation to tell the truth. The fact that he was to be sentenced a week later may have influenced his decision to talk openly to Kotz. Or it may simply have been his ego making a last grasp for attention. When it comes to assigning motives to Madoff’s actions, who can really say? His motives make him an enigma, even to this day.

As Kotz later recalled, Madoff was overly polite and seemed forthcoming. “I guess we were concerned that all the answers to our questions would be one or two words or he wouldn’t provide much information or his lawyer would cut him off every time he tried to say something, but there was none of that. He answered all of our questions expansively. It seemed like he didn’t hold anything back.”

Over a three-hour period, Kotz and Frangipane took copious, nearly verbatim notes as Madoff revealed for the first time the whole story of his Ponzi scheme, claiming it had been started almost by accident and that he admittedly was astonished that he hadn’t been caught by the SEC. He was extremely critical of that agency, calling its investigators idiots, assholes, and blowhards. Kotz noted how frequently Madoff boasted of his connections in the financial industry. “He claimed to know so many important people—‘I knew this one,’ that one ‘was a good friend,’ this one he ‘knows very well,’ that one he ‘had a special relationship with.’”

But it was about halfway through this interview, when Kotz asked him about me, that his attitude changed. “So let me ask you,” Kotz said, consulting his notepad, “How much do you know about Harry Markopolos?”

Madoff immediately waved his arm dismissively. He bristled. I was nothing, he told Kotz. “This guy is getting all this press, all this attention. He thinks he’s some kind of seer. But believe me, it’s all overblown. You know what? He’s really a joke in the industry.”

Madoff continued, explaining that I was “a guy who was just jealous” of his business success. As Kotz listened to him, he began to realize that Madoff considered me a competitor and appeared to be bothered by the fact that I was getting attention that rightfully belonged to him. He wouldn’t let it go. Later in the interview he defended his investment strategy, which I had ripped apart, telling Kotz, “All you have to do is look at the type of people I was doing this for to know it was a credible strategy. They knew the strategy was doable. They knew a lot more than this guy Harry.”

No, they didn’t. They just saw the money. And they could not see through the dangerously charming exterior of a man who labeled me a “joke.”

Let me say first that I take no pride in having the last laugh. I’m Harry Markopolos, and this is the true account of my first case as a whistleblower to the SEC.

How did I become a whistleblower? It all began in 1999 when my friend Frank Casey first brought Madoff to my attention. I was confounded by the Wall Street mogul’s financial successes, and had to know more. I tried but couldn’t replicate his results. I later concluded it was impossible. One red flag led to another, until there were simply too many to ignore.

In May 2000, I turned over everything I knew to the SEC. Five times I reported my concerns, and no one would listen until it was far too late. I was a whistleblower taking on one of the most powerful men on Wall Street, and at some points through the nightmarish journey, I feared for both my safety and that of my family. I was convinced the crime he was committing was going to be the worst in market history. Ten years later, Madoff is now behind bars and we all know why.

My investigation team, as it came to be known, was comprised of four honest people with the shared belief that good ethics demands action. The four of us were the last and unfortunately only functioning line of defense between Madoff, his global organization of feeder funds, and their victims. We tried mightily to stop what we knew was wrong. As a result of our work the SEC—if it continues to exist—will be a different agency, and the way we police and regulate our markets will have been changed completely.

This is our story.

Chapter 1

A Red Wagon in a Field of Snow

On the morning of December 11, 2008, a New York real estate developer on a JetBlue flight from New York to Los Angeles was watching CNBC on the small seat-back television. A crawl across the bottom of the screen reported that Bernard Madoff, a legendary Wall Street figure and the former chairman of NASDAQ had been arrested for running the largest Ponzi scheme in history. The developer sat silently for several seconds, absorbing that news. No, that couldn’t be right, he thought, but the message streamed across the screen again. Turning to his wife, he said that he knew that she wasn’t going to believe what he was about to tell her, but apparently Bernie Madoff was a crook and the millions of dollars that they had invested with him were lost. He was right—she didn’t believe him. Instead, she waved off the thought. “That’s not possible,” she said, and returned to the magazine she was reading.

The stunned developer stood up and walked to the rear of the plane, where the flight attendants had gathered in the galley. “Excuse me,” he said politely, “but I’m going to be leaving now. So would you please open the door for me? And don’t worry—I won’t need a parachute.”

At about 5:15 that December afternoon, I was at the local dojo in my small New England town watching my five-year-old twin boys trying to master the basic movements of karate. It had been a gloomy day. Rain continued intermittently, and there was a storm in the air. I noticed there were several voice mails on my cell phone. That’s curious, I thought; I hadn’t felt it vibrate. I stepped into the foyer to retrieve the messages. The first one was from a good friend named Dave Henry, who was managing a considerable amount of money as chief investment officer of DKH Investments in Boston. “Harry,” his message said clearly, “Madoff is in federal custody for running a Ponzi scheme. He’s under arrest in New York. Call me.” My heart started racing. The second message was also from a close friend, Andre Mehta, a super-quant who is a managing director of alternative investments at Cambridge Associates, a consultant to pension plans and endowments. I could hear the excitement in Andre’s voice as he said, “You were right. The news is hitting. Madoff’s under arrest. It looks like he was running a huge Ponzi scheme. It’s all over Bloomberg. Call me and I’ll read it to you. Congratulations.”

I was staggered. For several years I’d been living under a death sentence, terrified that my pursuit of Madoff would put my family and me in jeopardy. Billions of dollars were at stake, and apparently some of that money belonged to the Russian mafia and the drug cartels—people who would kill to protect their investments. And I knew all about Peter Scannell, a Boston whistleblower who had been beaten nearly to death with a brick simply for complaining about a million-dollar market-timing scam. So I wouldn’t start my car without first checking under the chassis and in the wheel wells. At night I walked away from shadows and I slept with a loaded gun nearby; and suddenly, instantly and unexpectedly, it was over. Finally, it was over. They’d gotten Madoff. I raised my fist high in the air and screamed to myself, “Yes!” My family was safe. Then I collapsed over a wooden railing. I had to grab hold of it to prevent myself from falling. I could barely breathe. In less time than the snap of my fingers I had gone from being supercharged with energy to being completely drained.

The first thing I wanted to do was return those calls. I needed to know every detail. It was only when I tried to punch in the numbers that I discovered how badly my hand was shaking. I called Dave back and he told me that the media was reporting that Bernie Madoff had confessed to his two sons that his multibillion-dollar investment firm was a complete fraud. There were no investments, he had told them; there never had been. Instead, for more than two decades, he had been running the largest Ponzi scheme in history. His sons had immediately informed the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and agents had shown up at Madoff’s apartment early that morning and arrested him. They’d taken him out in handcuffs. It looked like many thousands of people had lost billions of dollars.

It was exactly as I had warned the government of the United States approximately $55 billion earlier. And as I stood in the lobby of that dojo, my sense of relief was replaced by a new concern. The piles of documents I had in my possession would destroy reputations, end careers, and perhaps even bring down the entire Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the government’s Wall Street watchdog—unless, of course, the government got to those documents before I could get them published. I grabbed my kids and raced home.

My name is Harry Markopolos. It’s Greek. I’m a Chartered Financial Analyst and Certified Fraud Examiner, which makes me a proud Greek geek. And this, then, is the complete story of how my team failed to stop the greatest financial crime in history, Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. For the previous nine years I had been working secretly with three highly motivated men who worked in various positions in the financial industry to bring the Bernie Madoff fraud to the attention of the SEC. We had invested countless hours and risked our lives, and had saved no one—although eventually, after Madoff’s collapse, we would succeed in exposing the SEC as one of this nation’s most incompetent financial regulators.

For example, it was well known that Madoff operated his legitimate broker-dealer business on the 18th and 19th floors of the Lipstick Building on New York’s East Side. But what was not generally known was that his money management company, the fraud, was located on the 17th floor of that building. Months after Madoff’s collapse, the FBI would reveal to my team that based on our 2005 submission providing evidence that Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme, the SEC finally launched an investigation—but that its crack investigative team during the two-year-long investigation “never even figured out there was a 17th floor.” I had provided all the evidence they needed to close down Madoff—and they couldn’t find an entire floor. Instead they issued three technical deficiency notices of minor violations to Madoff’s broker-dealer arm. Now, that really is setting a pretty low bar for other government agencies to beat. But sadly, all of this nation’s financial regulators—the Federal Reserve Bank, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Office of Thrift Supervision—are at best incompetent and at worst captive to the companies they are supposed to regulate.

As I would later testify before Congress, “The SEC roars like a mouse and bites like a flea.” In retrospect, considering how much I have learned since then, and how much my team has learned, that probably was inaccurate: I was being too kind. Tens of thousands of lives have been changed forever because of the SEC’s failure. Countless people who relied on that agency for the promised protection have lost more than can ever be recovered. In some cases people lost everything they owned. And truthfully, the SEC didn’t even need to conduct an extensive investigation. My team had given them everything they needed. With the materials we submitted, it would have taken investigators no more than the time it took to ask Madoff three questions for his fraud to be discovered and his operation to be shut down. The magnitude of this Ponzi scheme is matched only by the willful blindness of the SEC to investigate Madoff.

This was not my first fraud investigation. My first investigation, which had a much more satisfying conclusion, concerned stolen fish. At one time my dad and two uncles owned a chain of 12 Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips restaurants in Maryland and Delaware. Eventually I became the assistant controller, which was basically a glorified bookkeeper. Then I became the manager of four units in Baltimore County. If you own a chain of restaurants, you will learn more about retail theft than you care to know. We had one manager who was using the restaurant as a front for his major income activity, which was selling drugs out of the drive-through window. Customers would place their order with him and find something other than fish and chips in their bags. We had another manager we knew was stealing from the restaurant, but we couldn’t figure out how he was doing it. Finally my uncle parked across the highway in the International House of Pancakes parking lot and watched him through a pair of binoculars. He discovered that when the cashier took her break, this manager would literally bring in another cash register from his car, and for the next hour he would ring up sales for himself. He had a nice business going; unfortunately, it was my family’s business.

We had a limited number of family members; so to eliminate fraud we had to rely on professional management, using the most advanced computers available at that time, to manage inventory. We had formulas for the components that went into every order: the amount of fish, chicken, shrimp, and clams. Every portion was controlled by size. I learned accounting in those restaurants. We continually matched our inventory to our sales and in that way could determine where our shortfalls were. Our goal was 3 percent waste. We wanted some waste, and some leftovers, because at the end of the night if you don’t have waste it means you’ve given your customers cold fish or spoiled shrimp that should have been thrown out. Too little waste meant you were not providing a quality product; too much waste meant there was theft.

When I discovered more than 5 percent waste in my district, I began examining the numbers. The numbers told me that something was fishy in one of our fish and chips stores. I appreciate mathematics, and I knew the answer was in front of me; I just had to be smart enough to find it. I enjoy watching the choreography of the numbers. There is a certain satisfaction I get from it. I wasn’t always that way; in seventh and eighth grades I struggled with math and needed a tutor to lead me through algebra. In high school I excelled in math and enjoyed it. I studied finance in college and had terrible calculus teachers. They were PhD’s who didn’t know how to teach. I couldn’t understand them, and I dropped the subject three times. I finally hired a PhD student in physics to tutor me, and eventually I was doing differential equations. I turned out to be a natural in math.

More than a natural, in fact. I’m a quant, which is the slang term for a quantitative analyst. Basically, that means I speak the language of numbers. Numbers can tell an entire story. I can see the beauty, the humor, and sometimes the tragedy in the numbers. Neil Chelo, a member of my Madoff team and a close friend, describes quants as people who conceptualize things in the form of numbers. As he says, quants look at numbers and see associations that other people aren’t even aware exist, and then understand the meaning of those associations in a unique way. A lot of my friends are quants. Neil is a quant; he can be obsessive about balancing not only his monthly bank statements, but even his credit card bills—to the penny. Quants are nerds and proud of it.

I look at numbers the way other people read books. For example, obviously computers are pretty darn fast doing math and calculating the value of derivatives, but even today there are certain calculations that are so math intensive that even a computer can choke on them. Occasionally a situation arises in which there is a second derivative, called gamma, which is the rate of change in the first derivative, delta. Don’t try to understand this calculation, unless you intend to trade options. You’ll never need to know how to do it and there is no test at the end. And you certainly won’t need to know it to understand how Bernie Madoff successfully ran his worldwide Ponzi scheme for decades. Bernie’s fraud was much less sophisticated than that. But in those situations prices can move literally at an infinite rate. A computer can’t track it very quickly. I can. After working in the financial industry for several years I could calculate those prices faster than a computer. Generally there were a couple of times every year when I had to throw out the computer and look at the price of a stock or the market and calculate my own option prices in a few seconds. In one of those situations, my ability to do the calculations rapidly and correctly could salvage our investment or even allow us to make a lot of money. Actually, it was that same combination of ability and experience that enabled me to look at the returns of Bernie Madoff and know almost instantly that his claims were impossible.

It was my ability to understand the numbers that allowed me to catch the thief in my fish and chips store. I started by inventorying every shift for a week or two, which allowed me to pinpoint those shifts on which the thefts were occurring. That allowed me to identify the suspects. Finally I determined that there was only one person working all those shifts. Once I knew who the thief was, I was careful not to catch him. He was putting food in a shopping bag and carrying it out to his car. If I had caught him doing it I would have had to fire him, which probably would have meant paying unemployment. The amount of money involved was too small for law enforcement to become involved, but significant for my business. So rather than firing him, I didn’t say a word. Over time I just cut back his hours until he was working only one shift a week—not enough to survive on—and he quit.

Bernie Madoff was a much bigger fish, but oddly enough not much more difficult to catch.

Actually, it was another fraud that first brought me into the financial industry. My father’s former banker, the man who got the family into fast food, was working as a registered representative, a salesman, at a firm called Yardley Financial Services. It was shut down after the CEO was caught selling fake London gold options. The former banker joined several other former Yardley employees and opened Makefield Securities. My dad bought a 25 percent interest in the firm, and I went to work there in 1987.

I began by doing oil and gas partnership accounting, completing depreciation schedules, matching trade confirms—all relatively basic and often very boring work. I probably was underpaid for the work I was doing, but whenever you work for family you’re going to be underpaid. Look at Bernie Madoff’s two sons. Their father was running the most successful fraud in history and—at least according to Bernie—he wouldn’t let them participate.

My first day as a licensed broker was October 19, 1987. I remember it well because that was the day the stock market crashed. Makefield was an over-the-counter market marker that traded between 12 and 25 stocks. We relied on Harris terminals—dumb terminals I called them because they did not automatically update prices. They simply provided the quote at the moment you hit the stock ticker. But they showed who was bidding and asking on shares at different prices. I came in to work that morning ready to begin my career as a broker, and instead walked into chaos.

We had only four phone lines coming in. They started ringing at 9 a.m. and never stopped. Not for a second. I knew that it was unusual, but I hadn’t been in the market long enough to understand it was unprecedented. I did know that it wasn’t good. We were one of the few companies buying that day, because we were short; we had been betting that the market would go down, and needed to cover our positions. For much of the time we didn’t even know where the market was—our computers couldn’t keep up with the price declines. The New York Stock Exchange tape was delayed about three hours, so at 1 o’clock in the afternoon we were still getting trades from 10 a.m. There wasn’t a moment of calm the entire day. Everybody in the office was shell-shocked. They were trading every step down. I had been trained, but I wasn’t ready to be thrown into the battle. I was so junior that they certainly weren’t going to trust me. I spent the day running errands and setting up trading calls so that our traders could handle their calls more efficiently. We knew the market was crashing, but we didn’t have enough information to understand how bad it was. The end of the day was the ugliest close anybody would ever want to see. We worked through much of the night processing trades, trying to get some understanding of where we were. The market had fallen almost 23 percent.

So much for my first day as a licensed broker.

What surprised me from the very beginning of my career was the level of corruption that was simply an accepted way of doing business. Bernie Madoff wasn’t a complete aberration; he was an extension of the cutthroat culture that was prevalent from the day I started. This is not an indictment of the whole industry. The great majority of people I’ve met in this industry are honest and ethical, but in a business where money is the scoreboard there is a certain level of ingrained dishonesty that is tolerated. I became disillusioned very quickly. I learned that the industry is based on predator-prey relationships. The equation is simple: If you don’t know who the predator is, then you are the prey. Frank Casey, who discovered Madoff for our team, referred to those elements on Wall Street that conduct their business for bottom-line profits rather than serving their clients as “rip your face off financing.” I don’t know where my education went wrong, but my brother and I had been taught that there was no such thing as a minor lapse of ethics. Either you were honest or you were not. It was not possible to be partly honest. I learned that at Cathedral Prep in Erie, Pennsylvania. It was the kind of Catholic school that had a very strict rule that every teacher followed: Once a teacher knocked you down he had to stop beating you.

I was one of the better-behaved students and was knocked out cold only once. At the beginning of the year we had to turn in two bars of soap to use in the showers after gym. I brought two bars of Pet’um Dog Soap, which leaves your coat shiny, clean, and tick-free. It had a nice drawing of a Scottish terrier on the wrapper, which I showed to my classmates. That was my mistake. The teacher called us individually to drop our soap in a box at the front of the room. When my name was called, the rest of the class started laughing loudly. The teacher looked in the box and found my Pet’ums. “Come here, Meathead,” he commanded. He grabbed a thick textbook and beat me with it until I went down. He followed the rules! When I got a beating like that I couldn’t go home and tell my parents, because my father would then give me another beating for causing a problem in school.

A prank I did get away with was infesting the school with fruit flies. In 10th-grade biology class we were breeding fruit flies for a series of experiments. I managed to sneak a vial home and secretly bred two complete cycles, so I had tens of thousands of fruit flies in a five-gallon jar. I explained to my mother that I was breeding them for a special science project. One morning I convinced her to bring me to school early. I slipped into the school through an open door by the cafeteria and released them all. It took them three days to infest the entire building, which had to be fumigated over the weekend.

More often, though, I got caught. Detention was held on Saturday mornings, when our job was to clean the school. I was a regular in detention. My parents never knew, though; I managed to convince my mother that I was in a special honors program that met on Saturday mornings. She would brag to her friends that her son Harry was so smart he was invited to attend honors classes on Saturdays!

At Cathedral Prep the difference between right and wrong was demonstrated to me on a daily basis. I learned there that actions had consequences. When I began working in the financial industry I learned very quickly that dishonest actions also had consequences—often you ended up making a lot more money. The most valuable commodity in the financial industry is information. Manipulating the market in any way that gives an individual access to information not available to other people on an equal basis is illegal. In early 1988 I was promoted to over-the-counter trader. I was making a market in about 18 NASDAQ stocks. One of the companies with which I traded regularly was Madoff Securities. That was the first time I had ever heard the name. All I knew was that it was a large and well-respected company at the other end of the phone. Madoff was a market maker—the middleman between buyers and sellers of stocks—and if you were dealing in over-the-counter stocks, eventually you had to do business with Madoff. It was soon after I started trading that I encountered massive violations taking place on an hourly basis. This was not true at Madoff specifically; in fact, I don’t remember a single incident in which its brokers were dishonest. But I had just learned all the regulations, and I saw them broken every day, every hour; and everybody knew about it and nobody seemed to care. The regulations were quite clear. The sellers in a deal have 90 seconds to report a trade. By not reporting it they were allowing the price to stay at levels different from those that would have resulted if the trading volume had been reported. Basically, it meant they were trading on inside information, which is a felony. It causes a lack of the transparency that is necessary to maintain fair and orderly markets.

This happened in my trades every day. It was an accepted way of doing business, although I couldn’t accept it. I would report it regularly to the district office of the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) in Philadelphia, and they never did a thing about it.

My younger brother had similar experiences. At one point he was hired by a respected brokerage firm in New Jersey to run its trading desk. On his first morning there he walked into the office and discovered that the Bloomberg terminals that supposedly had been ordered hadn’t arrived. Then he found out that the traders didn’t have their Series 7 licenses, meaning they weren’t allowed to trade. And then he learned that the CEO had some Regulation 144 private placement stock, which legally is not allowed to be sold. But the CEO had inside information that bad news was coming and he wanted to sell the stock. My brother explained to the CEO, “You can’t sell this stock. It’s a felony.” The CEO assured him he understood.

My brother went out to lunch with the Bloomberg rep to try to get the terminals installed that he needed to start trading. By the time he returned to the office, the unlicensed traders had illegally sold the private placement stock based on insider information. My brother had walked into a perfect Wall Street storm.

He called me in a panic. “What do I do?”

I said, “These are felonies. The first thing to do is write your resignation letter. The second thing you do is get copies of all the trade tickets; get all the evidence you can on your way out the door. And the third thing you do is go home and type up everything and send it to the NASD.” That’s exactly what he did. The NASD did absolutely nothing. These were clear felonies and the NASD didn’t even respond to his complaint.

When I started at Makefield in 1987, the industry was just beginning to become computerized, so most of the business was still done on the phone. I would spend all day with a phone hanging from my ear. I spoke with many of the same people every day and often got to know them well—even though I never met them in person. Among the people I most enjoyed speaking with was a client named Greg Hryb, who was with Kidder Peabody’s asset management arm, Webster Capital. Greg was nice enough to take time during those calls to teach me the business. When he started his own asset management firm, Darien Capital Management, in June 1988, he hired me as an assistant portfolio manager and an asset manager trainee. I moved to Darien, Connecticut, that August, and it was there that my education really began.

Darien Capital Management was a small firm; there were only four or five of us working there. But in the early 1990s we were managing slightly more than a billion dollars. And that’s when a billion dollars was a lot of money. We considered ourselves an asset management firm, but we operated as a hedge fund. Because we were so small, each of us had to wear many hats, which was a great opportunity for me. I did everything there from routine correspondence, monthly client statements, and handling of compliance issues to assisting a very good fixed-income portfolio manager. It was a lot of grunt work, but I was in on all the action. I got to learn the business of being a money manager by being an assistant portfolio manager. I learned more there in three years than I might have learned elsewhere in a decade.

Certainly one of the more important things I learned was that the numbers can be deceiving. There is a logic to mathematics, but there is also the underlying human element that must be considered. Numbers can’t lie, but the people who create those numbers can and do. As so many people have learned, forgetting to include human nature in an equation can be devastating. Greg Hryb showed me the value of networking; he helped me build the wide spectrum of friends and associates I was able to call upon during the nine years of our investigation.

I stayed at Darien Capital for three years. One of the people who marketed our products was a woman named Debbi Hootman. Eventually I became friendly with Debbi and her future husband, Tim Ng, who was working at Smith Barney at that time. Eventually Tim recommended me to Dave Fraley, the managing partner at Rampart Investment Management Company, in Boston, who hired me as a derivatives portfolio manager.

Rampart was an eight- or nine-person institutional asset management firm that ran almost nine billion dollars, the majority of it for state pension plans. When I began working there it had a suit-and-tie, kind of starchy New England atmosphere. It exemplified the conservative Wall Street firm. Gradually, though, just like in the industry itself, standards were relaxed and we evolved into a more casual dress-down-Fridays place to do business. It was at Rampart that I began my pursuit of Madoff and my battle with the SEC.

The relentless quest pursued by just about every person working in the financial industry is to discover inefficiencies in the market that can be exploited. It’s sort of like trying to find a small crack in a wall—and then driving a truck through it. At one time, the business of Wall Street consisted almost entirely of selling stocks and bonds; it was a staid, predictable business. Stocks went up; stocks went down. But then some very smart people began developing an array of creative investment products, among them indexed annuities, exchange-traded funds, structured products, and mortgage-backed securities. The business of basic investments became extraordinarily complicated, far too complicated for the casual investor to understand. Every firm in the industry and practically every person in the business had a theory and developed their own niche product in which they became expert. Everybody. These products were created to take advantage of every move the market made. Up, down—that didn’t matter anymore. So rather than simply picking stocks in companies whose names they recognized and whose products they used, investors suddenly had a supermarket of esoteric—meaning sometimes speculative and risky—investment opportunities from which to choose. Rampart’s investment strategy was called the Rampart Options Management System. It’s not important that you understand what we did, but simply that Rampart sold call options against client portfolios in a highly disciplined fashion, which would generate cash flow while reducing the overall risk. We were writing covered calls on big stock portfolios for institutions. It was a strategy that over an entire market cycle increased income while decreasing risk—as long as our client didn’t panic at the top. Unfortunately, as I learned, too many clients panicked right before the market topped and pulled out just before the strategy was about to become highly profitable.

Each summer Rampart would bring in an unpaid intern from a local college and I would mentor him or her. In the summer of 1993 that intern was Neil Chelo, a confident, wiry young man from Bentley College, a business school in Waltham, Massachusetts. Several years later Neil was to become a member of my Madoff team. Neil almost didn’t take the intern job. Although his father encouraged him to work for the experience, telling him that Wall Street people were smart and that if he got down in the trenches with them, eventually he would make a lot of money, his mother was strongly against it. “Be something respectable,” she told him. “Be a doctor or a lawyer.” He pointed out to her that they were Turkish-Albanian, not Jewish. But what really upset her was the fact that her Turkish-Albanian son was going to work for a Greek! She told him, “Oh, my God, Neil. That’s why you’re not getting paid. The Greeks always take advantage of the Turks!”

Of course, as I would occasionally point out to Neil, that’s not exactly the way Greeks interpret the Greek-Turkish relationship.

When Neil began his internship, he assumed he was going to sit down at the trading desk and learn by participating in the business. Instead, I handed him a reading list of about 14 books and told him his job that summer was to read all of them so we could discuss them. Among the books on my list were Market Wizards by Jack Schwager (New York Institute of Finance, 1989); Justin Mamis’s TheNature of Risk (Addison-Wesley, 1991); and Minding Mr. Market