No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller by Harry Markopolos (rainbow fish read aloud .txt) 📗

Some of the explanations I heard bordered on the incredible. These were sophisticated guys who knew they had a great thing going and wanted it to keep going. They were smart enough to see the potholes, so they had to invent some preposterous explanation to fill them. They knew, for example, that a split-strike strategy can’t produce a profit in all market environments, so they had to explain how Madoff always returned a profit. “Here’s what I think it is, Harry,” a portfolio manager told me. “He’s really smart. It’s really important to him that he show his investors low volatility to keep them happy, so what he does when the market is down is he subsidizes them.” In other words, in those months when Madoff’s fund loses money, he absorbs the loss and continues to return a profit to the investors. “He can afford to eat the losses.” This explanation positioned Madoff as the greatest investment manager in the history of Wall Street. He made it impossible for the investor to lose.

Neil admitted to me once that this was not an investment strategy that had ever been discussed at Bentley College. When we heard some of these explanations we would just look at each other and laugh. There was no other sane way of responding. Not only did these people refuse to look behind the curtain, but they granted the wizard even greater powers than he personally claimed.

Apparently Madoff also had the ability to time the market perfectly. He said he invested in the market only six to eight times a year, and even then for only brief periods of time ranging from a few days to maybe three weeks, tops. Fortunately, he had the ability to invest only when the market was going up. I had noticed in his return stream that the market had declined rapidly in July and December 1999. When I asked one of his investors to explain to me how he could have avoided a loss those months, I was told, “He wasn’t in the market. He goes one hundred percent cash when he thinks it’s going to fall.” He had proof of that, this man told me. He had copies of Madoff’s trade tickets.

But of all the stories I heard those first few weeks, the one that probably shocked Neil and me the most was told to Frank Casey by the representative of a London-based fund of funds. The majority of people we spoke with actually hadn’t invested with Madoff. Those people didn’t want to talk about it; they didn’t have Madoff, that’s all. No explanation. But a trader at one of Wall Street’s largest firms told me that Madoff had been up there trying to interest them in investing, but they’d turned him down when he refused to let them conduct the necessary due diligence. They wanted to conduct a standard financial investigation to make certain he was legitimate and had been turned down. That’s the brightest warning signal of all.

Due diligence can take many different forms. The object is to make sure the numbers are real. It can include everything from a complete audit of records, which involves matching trading tickets to exchange-reported time, price, and quantity for each trade, to extensive background checks on the fund managers. Conducting a thorough due diligence can take several months and cost more than $100,000. But when you’re investing hundreds of millions of dollars, it isn’t the time to try to save a few bucks. A London-based hedge fund of funds told Frank a similar story. It was handling a substantial amount of Arab oil money, and before investing with Madoff it had asked his permission to hire one of the Big Six accounting firms to verify his performance. Madoff refused, saying that the only person allowed to see the secret sauce, to audit his books, was his brother-in-law’s accounting firm. Actually, we heard this from multiple sources. The fact is that Madoff’s accountant for 17 years, beginning in 1992, was David Friehling, who definitely was not his brother-in-law. Friehling operated out of a small storefront office in the upstate New York town of New City. It seems likely that Madoff claimed he was a relative because it was the only plausible reason he could think of to explain why a sophisticated multibillion-dollar hedge fund would use a two-person storefront operation in a small town as its auditor. Brother-in-law or not, this certainly should have been a major stop sign. Even a marginally competent fund manager should have said, “Thank you very much, Mr. Madoff, but no thanks,” and run as fast as possible in the other direction. But this fund of funds didn’t. Instead, this firm, which had been entrusted by investors with hundreds of millions of dollars, handed Bernie Madoff $200 million. The firm knew enough to ask to see how the machine worked, but after it had been turned down flat it still handed over $200 million.

None of us—Frank, Neil, or myself—was naive. We had been in the business long enough to see the corners cut, the dishonesty, and the legal financial scams. But I think even we were surprised at the excuses really smart people made for Bernie. The fact that seemingly sophisticated investors would give Madoff hundreds of millions of dollars after he refused to allow them to conduct ordinary due diligence was a tribute to either greed or stupidity.

The feeder funds—funds that basically raised money for a larger master fund—knew. They knew as much as they wanted to know. They knew they could make money with him; they knew that if they kept their money with him for six years they basically would double their original investment, so they were betting against the clock. And he wasn’t that unusual. It wasn’t like everybody else in the business was completely honest and he was the only one cheating. They all knew how much of Wall Street’s business was done in the shade. This was just another guy