By Cynthia Citron
- Cynthia Citron
ENCINO, California– A decade before the thousands of people who had invested their money with Bernie Madoff realized that they had lost it all, a Boston-based securities analyst was blowing his whistle loud enough to wake all of Wall Street. But Wall Street wouldn’t listen.
Harry Markopolos, who had gathered enough evidence of Madoff’s extravagant fraud to send him to jail for 150 years (the sentence Madoff eventually received), was incredulous that nobody believed him. Like America’s largest corporations, Madoff was “too big to fail.”
In a new documentary film based on Markopolos’ book No One Would Listen, Markopolos, portraying himself, is the
star, and the intrepid investigators who worked with him over the years also tell their tales as writer/director Jeff Prosserman unravels the elaborate Ponzi scheme that Madoff perpetrated on his devoted investors.
It would seem that those investors might have suspected something was amiss when they kept receiving dividends on
their investments that far exceeded what other investment companies were producing. But hey, who’s going to argue
with success?
And who was going to follow all the strands of Madoff’s schemes—-the shadow companies, the European royalty, the major corporations, the charities, the bankers and celebrities and Wall Street mavens who were part of Madoff’s global network of investors and protectors?
It’s no wonder that Markopolos, who persisted in his fruitless quest in the face of massive indifference, denial, skepticism, and interference, began to fear for his life. As he became more paranoid over the years, he was easier to dismiss as a madman. And dismiss him they did. The newspapers, the Securities and Exchange Commission, agencies of the government, the financial services industry, and many other organizations that should have been paying attention, or at least checking out Markopolos’ facts and figures, found it in their best interests to ignore him.
The story, told by Markopolos and his investigative teammates, is called Chasing Madoff, and it is a clearly presented, intelligent expose that is not only
easily understandable, but also shocking in its simplicity. You are hard put to understand how people who were supposed to be overseeing such activity let it go on for so long. But then, there were no regulations tocontrol those activities, and too many people were benefiting from the scheme
As Director Prosserman notes, “For me, Chasing Madoff is a microcosm of the greed and hubris that plague our turbulent economic times. Although the actions on Wall Street are not always illegal, more often than not they are unscrupulous.”
He concludes, “Chasing Madoff is a financial thriller wrapped in an ethical case study that raises the questions ‘Can ethics exist in capitalism? Can greatness be morally achieved? And who can we really trust?’”
Chasing Madoff doesn’t answer these questions, but in raising them Prosserman has put together one helluvan interesting—-and ultimately chilling—film.
Chasing Madoff will be arriving in theaters on August 26th.
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Citron is Los Angeles bureau chief for San Diego Jewish World. She may be contacted at cynthia.citron@sdjewishworld.com