HarryMarkopolos began trying to blowthewhistle on Bernie Madoff as the largest fraud in the history of global finance, nearly two years afterMadoffwas arrested,more than a year after hewas sent to jail for the rest of his life—and, still, Markopolos simmerswith an anger that can only be called righteous.Not really atMadoff himself, althoughMarkopolos does consider himto be “the face of evil,” but rather at the many,many investment officers, regulators, and other finance professionalswho should have caught himover the decades he perpetrated his $65-billion Ponzi scheme. It creeps up onMarkopolos.He’ll start off good-naturedly,
answering a basic question about the undergraduate degree he earned fromLoyola UniversityMaryland in Baltimore—a bachelor of arts in business administration—with a bemused monologue about howit’s beenwrongly reported that he has an accounting degree andworked as an accountant. But the more he talks, the less lighthearted he becomes. Because all of that reminds himof the fact that,when it came toMadoff, “the accountantsmissed somuch, and itwas so obvious,” Markopolos said over lunch inWashington,D.C.,where he wasmaking three different presentations at the 2010 Fraud Conference. “Hewas using the same account formats for three different fake custody banks, three different countries. ... The account numbers had the same format and beganwith the same four characters. Clearly impossible.”Markopolos looked straight down at his plate, and his voice got louder and faster. “And the accounting firms said theywere verifying assets— therewere no assets there, sowhatwere they verifying?” It isn’t long beforeMarkopolosmoves on to the federal reg- ulatorswho consistently failed to investigateMadoff, or any-
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thing else thatwas happening in the economy at the same time. “What’s amazing about not only theMadoff case but the whole near-collapse of our financial system,” he said, “is there’s been no accountability, either in the private sector or in the public sector.…Why shouldwe trust the same clowns that missed everything leading up to the near-collapse in 2008? Why should they keep their jobs and not be held accountable?”
‘The Greek Out of the Restaurant’ Before he became theMadoffwhistleblower, and found him- self, over and over, asking these unanswered—and possibly unanswerable—questions,Markopoloswas an Army veteran who’d turned his faculty for numbers into a career as a “finance and capital-markets guy.”Hewas born in Erie, Pa., a second-generationGreek-Americanwho came tomilitary serv- ice naturally: Both of his grandfathers gained U.S. citizenship by serving in the Army duringWorldWar II, and his father served in the Army during the KoreanWar. “I tried to enlist at the age of 17, aftermy senior year of
high school,” saidMarkopolos,who turns 54 thismonth but projects a decade or two younger, thanks to a swoop of dark- brown hair falling across his forehead and a boyish giggle that punctuates his frequent deadpan jokes. “I neededmy parents’ permission, and theywouldn’t sign. They said, ‘You have to go to college.’” So he did.Within his first twoweeks at Loyola, he met some students and facultywith the school’s Army ROTC programand signed up.He graduated fromLoyola in 1978, received a reserve commission as a second lieutenant, andwas assigned command of a rifle platoon. “I chose infantry,” he said. “Obviouslymoremacho than brains.”
“Madoff stood for everything we stood against. I learned in the military when you take the oath, you’re standing for something.”
But brains, too. After three years he became a support pla-
toon leader for the battalion, then company executive officer. He spent four yearswith logistics, and another seven in civil affairswith the U.S. Army SpecialOperations Command. Serv- ingwith the Army Reserve and ArmyNationalGuard, he also worked in the civilianworld—startingwith the restaurants and bars that his family owned, including a chain of Arthur Treacher’s Fish&Chips franchiseswhere he uncovered his first case of fraud, by an employeewhowas stealing food. “You can
AN ARMY OF FOUR: Harry Markopolos and Madoff investigation team member Frank Casey both served in the Army. The other two members of the team didn’t, Markopolos said, but “they had a firm sense of ethics, that this was wrong and they wanted it stopped.” Opposite top, Markopolos is pictured at his Army ROTC commis- sioning ceremony at Loyola University Maryland in 1978 (left), and with a fellow service member at a Thanksgiving party for the 229th Supply & Transport Battalion in 1985 (right).