Reluctant Star in Limelight in Madoff Scandal
Reluctant Star in Limelight in Madoff Scandal
January 13, 2009, 11:58 am

Harry Markopolos has emerged, quite reluctantly, as a star in the Bernard L. Madoff investment debacle, and book publishers and movie producers now want to tell his story, with him as the hero.

Mr. Markopolos’s story, of course, is already pretty well known: The slightly bookish forensic accountant spent years tracking Mr. Madoff, trying in vain to replicate his legendary returns. After years of coming up short, he came to the conclusion that something was terribly wrong.

“You can’t dominate all markets,” Mr. Markopolos told The Boston Globe. “You have to have some losses.”

Mr. Madoff seemed to produce steady, positive returns no matter how the market moved. Over time, Mr. Markopolos realized that Mr. Madoff was nothing more than a charlatan, so he spent years tracking his moves and reporting them to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The culmination of his analysis was a memo Mr. Markopolos sent to regulators in 2005 that he titled “The World’s Largest Hedge Fund Is a Fraud.” It outlined his suspicions in more detail and invited officials to check his theories.

But it wasn’t the S.E.C. that finally put an end to Mr. Madoff’s elaborate scheme; it was Mr. Madoff’s sons who turned him in to authorities.

Still, Mr. Markopolos is being hailed as the man that first exposed the fraud, shining the limelight down on a man who is reluctant to step inside of it.

“Why would people think I feel good about this?” Mr. Markopolos asked at one point in a series of recent interviews with The Boston Globe. “People think I’m a hero, but I didn’t stop him. He stopped himself.”

While the limelight may be blinding, it hasn’t stopped Mr. Markopolos from fielding calls from publishers and movie producers. He told The Globe that he was reluctant to take the leading-man role and that he was not interested in cooperating with many of the authors and filmmakers — and he worries that Hollywood will take liberties with the story.

“They’ll just add in sex and violence,” he said.

–Cyrus Sanati

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