Read No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller for Free Online

Information on a database that can be purchased is available to everyone; there’s no advantage to having it, but the knowledge that one day might make a difference is best obtained from others in simple conversations. It’s stuff you can’t buy from a database provider; you have to learn it one relationship at a time. In the army we called it human intelligence gathering.
     
    I had established the one-third rule: For every three hours you spend at work you have to spend at least one hour outside the office on professional development. That might mean reading material that might improve your life, but more likely it meant—just as I had learned at Darien Capital—social networking. I encouraged Neil to take advantage of the pub culture in Boston, to go to professional association meetings, and to go to dinners. As I explained to him, that’s where the information that one day may make the difference is learned. That’s where you find out what other firms are doing to be successful and where they are failing, what their problems are, and how they’re dealing with them. For example, in those social conversations you hear about the idiosyncrasies of different traders, so when you see them making a move you know how to properly interpret it. I taught him that it is important to know everything that’s going on in your field, in your industry, and in your sector in the industry, and that the only real way to do that is going to lunches and dinners and happy hours and meetings and getting there early and staying late. I taught him that ignorance begins where knowledge ends, so to be successful he needed to be a gatherer and a hoarder of information.
     
    These were the tools we depended on throughout our investigation.
     
    When Neil returned to college in the fall of 1992 to earn credit for his work as an intern, he had to write a paper. This will tell you what you need to know about Neil: The paper he wrote criticized the basic investment strategy we used at Rampart because it violated the efficient markets hypothesis.
     
    Three years later, after working in various jobs at several different types of investment companies, Neil returned to Rampart. Initially he was hired to upgrade our accounting system, with the unspoken hope that eventually it might become something more. For several months Neil ran two accounting systems—our legacy system and the new system—in parallel, and reconciled everything to the penny. If he couldn’t get that last penny to balance, he’d work at it until it did. But what he really wanted to do was portfolio management. Eventually our desks were back-to-back; so we sat directly across from each other, separated only by a divider about 18 inches high, for nine hours a day, five days a week. Over several years we got to know each other better than we knew our families. Neil and I were both research geeks who loved the hunt, and we spent considerable time searching for ways to optimally create portfolios that had the highest chance of beating the benchmark with the lowest risk. We pushed each other. So when we first encountered Bernie Madoff it was only logical that we would see it as an academic exercise, as another strategy to be taken apart and analyzed to help us develop a strategy that would benefit our clients, and not as the largest fraud in Wall Street history. We weren’t looking for a crime; we simply wanted to see how he made his numbers dance.
     
    It was Frank Casey who first brought Bernie Madoff to my attention. Frank Casey worked on the other side of the ledger; years ago he would have been known as a customer’s man, but now he was a marketing representative. Frank is a gregarious Irishman, a man who attacks life and has combined his gift of language with his effervescent personality to become a successful salesman. In addition to selling our financial products, he also would find needs in the market that we might fill. On Wall Street a salesman is an interpreter of