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

“Well, I don’t know anything about that,” Zuckerman said. “But whatever happened before I’d really like to talk to you now.” I had never spoken to Greg Zuckerman, but with John Wilke unavailable I had no choice but to work with him. I needed to get my documents published, and whatever had happened in the past, the Journal was still the best place for that. So I needed Zuckerman almost as much as he needed me. I found out later that he’d learned my identity—and gotten my phone number—from Mike Ocrant, who considered him a reliable and ethical journalist.

Frank Casey, Neil Chelo, and Mike Ocrant were each going through similar experiences. I called Frank as soon as I could. He had just left his apartment in a high-rise on the Boston waterfront and was riding down in the elevator when I found him. “You’re not gonna believe this,” I said. I was calling from my office as I gathered my papers. “Bernie just blew up. He admitted the whole thing was a Ponzi scheme.”

“I’ll call you right back,” he said. Frank got out of the elevator and went right back up to his apartment. “He just crumbled,” I continued, and began filling him in on the few details I had learned. As we were talking, Frank’s other cell phone rang. It was Mike Ocrant, calling from New York. “Oh my God,” he said. “Did you hear the news?”

Frank was balancing two phones when his house phone rang. His wife answered it and indicated it sounded important. “I’ll call you back,” he told me and Ocrant. The insurance executive he’d met only weeks earlier and warned about Bernie was calling. “First of all,” the man said, “I want to say thank you. Thank you for everything you tried to do for me.”

Frank could tell from the sadness in his voice that the outcome hadn’t been good. “What happened?”

“I took your e-mail to my father-in-law and I read it to him word for word,” he said, his voice choking. “He said, ‘This is incredulous. I don’t believe it. Bernie would never do this to me; he wouldn’t do it.’ He wouldn’t do anything about it. We lost everything, absolutely every penny.”

“I’m really sorry,” Frank said.

“No, I really want to thank you for your effort,” the executive said, and after another few awkward words they hung up. Frank turned on the television to try to find out what was going on.

Mike Ocrant had been in a team meeting to discuss an upcoming conference. As he walked into his office his phone was ringing. It was a close friend, Hal Lux, a former top financial journalist who had joined the hedge fund industry and most recently had become a senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he focuses on financial market research. “Did you hear?”

“Hear what?”

“You were right,” he said. “Your story was totally right. Madoff just got arrested for running a Ponzi scheme. You’re the man!”

Seven years too late, Mike thought, seven years too late. A few minutes later he called Frank, who was talking to me. “Harry was right the whole time,” Mike told him. “It wasn’t front-running; it was a Ponzi.”

“I know. I’m on the other phone with him right now.”

Neil had been having a very difficult day. Personal problems were hitting him hard and he was trying to escape into work. When he checked his e-mail, he found a message from a hedge fund manager with whom he’d been friendly for years. It was a cryptic message: “No Madoff, right?” Without knowing Madoff had collapsed, that message made no sense. Neil wondered if he had told this manager about our investigation. Maybe, but he wasn’t sure. So what did that mean—“No Madoff, right?”

He called the fund manager, who told him, “Check out Bloomberg. It’s the headline. Madoff turned himself in.” Neil turned and looked at the Bloomberg terminal. The headline confirmed it. Bernie Madoff had been arrested for running a $50 billion Ponzi scheme.

Neil took a deep breath, then turned away from the monitor and went back to work. The day was too hard for him to get any satisfaction from this. Later in the West Coast afternoon he began trading e-mails with me and the rest of the team.

When I told my attorney for my other fraud cases, Gaytri Kachroo, that Madoff had surrendered, she asked curiously, “Who’s Madoff?” I had never told her about this case, and at first she didn’t comprehend how big or serious it was. “This was my first case,” I explained. “I’ve been working on it for a long, long time.”

Her primary concerns were how it would affect me and how it would impact the cases on which we were working. “Just calm down,” she told me. “You have a responsibility to the whistleblowers on your other cases, so we need to go slow with this.”

As the story unfolded over the next few days, she began to grasp its significance. But it wasn’t until she was on an Air India flight to Delhi with her children that she finally got it. As she told me, she was stunned to hear the people sitting near her on the plane talking about me—in French. They’re talking about Harry, she thought. That’s my client! And when the plane landed in Paris for a stopover she bought a copy of the newspaper Le Monde—and found a story about me on the front page. That was also the first time she realized that her life was about to change, too.

In Whitman, it would be almost a full day before Sergeant Harry Bates of the Whitman police department saw my picture pop up on the TV screen. He stood there with his mouth open, thinking, I don’t believe this. I do not believe this. This is the biggest thing to happen around here since ice cream! And he shook his head and smiled,