No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller (6 page)

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Authors: Harry Markopolos

BOOK: No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller
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It is surprising that nobody actually knows how many hedge funds or money management firms operating as hedge funds exist in this country. There are no regulations that require funds to register; in fact, there are actually few regulations that they have to follow. But there at least 8,000 hedge funds, and perhaps thousands more. So out of all of those funds, how did I manage to find and identify the single most corrupt operation in the world? (Or at least I certainly hope he was the most corrupt one.) Our investigation of Bernie Madoff started with these conversations between Frank Casey and me.
 
A properly managed firm invests its clients’ money in a variety of financial products. The firm’s goal is to create a balanced portfolio that has the potential to earn substantial profits while being protected from any drastic losses. A conservative portfolio, for example, consists of about 60 percent equity—stocks—and 40 percent bonds. Frank would meet regularly with portfolio managers to see what kinds of investments they were looking for and try to fulfill those needs.
 
Like Neil and me, Frank was always looking to expand the number and quality of Rampart’s products. He had been hired because our two primary products, the Rampart Options Management System and a covered call writing program, had lost their sizzle and we needed something new to sell. So almost immediately he began trying to develop innovative ways to market our expertise. Among the products he and Neil worked on were principle-protected notes, which provide the chance of making a profit with the guarantee that you can’t lose the principle. Basically they involved using part of the investment to buy zero-coupon Treasury bonds, knowing the return over five or 10 years would equal the entire investment, and using the rest of the money to invest in hedge funds with leverage. The worst-case scenario was that after five or 10 years you’d get the original investment back but without any earnings. Basically, if the investment went south, the most a client could lose was the interest he or she would have made on the principle over five or 10 years. Frank’s plan was to have certain banks construct a blended pool of fund managers that could use the investment portion to produce something close to a 1 percent monthly return to the client, with the triple-A-rated bank guaranteeing the return of the original investment. Dave Fraley was supportive, telling Frank to try to build that part of the business. So Frank began prospecting institutions throughout New England, all the way into New York City.
 
The financial industry is a business of contacts and relationships. No one ever buys a product and says, “That product is the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen. I don’t care who’s selling it.” Generally people do business with people they trust and like, or people who are recommended by someone they trust. So like any good salesman, Frank was always looking for leads. He was constantly asking us who we knew at what firms. Who could we introduce him to? He used to complain that I never introduced him to my friends, and there was some truth to that. Finally, though, I referred Frank to my old friend Tim Ng, who was then a junior partner at a Madison Avenue fund of funds, Access International Advisors. Basically, Access was a hedge fund of funds whose investments were spread among several other hedge funds. It was what I always referred to as fighting size, meaning it managed more than $1 billion. I only found out later that almost all of its clients were European royalty or high-born old money.
 
As I told Frank, “I’ve heard from Tim Ng that his boss found a manager who’s putting out one to two percent a month or more net to client. Would that help you in building these principle-protected notes?”
 
The fact is that I was curious to see how this manager could consistently generate such a high return. Nobody ever beats the market month after month—nobody. The market can go up, remain neutral, or go down. There is no single strategy that provides a consistent return no matter what the market does. So I told Frank, “Why don’t you go down there and figure out what their game is?”
 
Frank wanted to know about this manager, too; if he really was that good, Frank could refer him to the banks that were building portfolios for Rampart. If he actually had discovered the holy grail, we could use him in our products.
 
They met in Access’s Madison Avenue office. Unlike so many of the elaborately decorated financial offices, this one was tastefully but simply decorated. It was an open plan, with steel desks side by side: a working office. Tim explained to Frank that he didn’t handle that side of the business and set up an appointment for him with the CEO of Access, a Frenchman named Thierry de la Villehuchet. Like Frank, I would eventually get to know and like Thierry very much. Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet was a terrific person, a French nobleman who, as it tragically turned out, truly was a noble man, a man of honor. He wasn’t an expert in financial math, but he was a great salesman. He and another Frenchman, Patrick Littaye, had founded Access. Both Thierry and Patrick had lived in the United States long enough to consider themselves Americans. They loved the American entrepreneurial spirit and considered themselves Americans in spirit. Thierry believed completely in American values. He took the Statue of Liberty very seriously. As Thierry once explained to me, in a French accent tempered by the years he’d lived here, “The French are socialists; we’re not socialists. Americans are capitalists; we’re capitalists. We believe in economic freedom; therefore we’re Americans.”
 
Thierry had a medium build, and everything about him was impeccable. He was always formal, always dressed in a suit and tie. The product he was marketing was himself, and he sold it well. I never knew precisely how old he was, but I guessed he was in his mid-50s when we met. I never knew how wealthy he was, but clearly he was a quietly rich man. Like Frank, Thierry was passionate about sailing, and one afternoon I took him to a shop that specialized in miniature sailboats and nautical items for home decor. He bought a miniature sailboat for $5,000 for his home in Westchester County, New York. “Maybe I overpaid,” he told me, “but I loved that boat.”
 
As it turned out, Thierry had his own motive for meeting Frank Casey. While his firm was called “International,” almost all the investments managed by Access came from Europe, and Thierry was trying to raise Wall Street money. So during this first meeting with Frank, Thierry spent considerable time promoting his company. That’s probably why he was unusually candid about the business. “At first I was the hedge fund unit of a French bank in the United States,” he explained. “I built this business basically to find the best managers early in their careers and lock them up for capacity, so later when people wanted to invest with them I would have access to them. Therefore the name of our firm: Access to the best managers. That’s what we provide for our clients.”
 
When Frank asked him specifically about the manager who supposedly was producing a 1 to 2 percent net return each month, Thierry nodded. “It’s true. I do have this manager who’s producing a good steady one to two percent net, and I found him early in the development here. He’s my partner. But I’m sorry—I’m not supposed to tell his name to anyone. If I do he might not give me any capacity.”
 
That was curious. Generally, when someone is consistently able to produce such spectacular returns, they would want their name and success widely circulated. What could possibly be better for business? But this manager was threatening to turn away clients who dared mention his name. Frank asked why this manager wanted his identity kept secret.
 
“He doesn’t hold himself out to be a hedge fund. He has only a few large clients. Actually he’s a broker-dealer, but he’s using hedge fund strategies in his money management business.”
 
At that moment Frank had no reason to question any of this. And if what Thierry was telling him was true, this manager was a major find. He told Thierry, “You know, we might be interested in doing business with Access if you could put together a portfolio. If you included managers like him I probably could get the banks to guarantee the return of principle.”
 
Thierry liked that concept. “His name is Bernie Madoff.”
 
Anyone who had worked in the stock market even for a short period of time knew that name, if not his background. The company he’d founded, Madoff Investment Securities LLC, was among the most successful broker-dealers on Wall Street, specializing in over-the-counter stocks. Madoff Securities was a well-known market maker, meaning he both bought and sold stocks, making his profit by selling for a few cents more per share than his purchase price. Madoff Securities was a pioneer in electronic trading, enabling the company to rapidly move large blocks of over-the-counter stocks. But what really set Madoff apart was his willingness to pay for order flow. Normally, the difference between what market makers paid for a stock and what they sold it for was about 12.5 cents. That was their profit. But instead of taking a fee for this service, as was normally done, Bernie actually paid firms as much as two cents per share for their business. Even though he was earning a penny or two less per share, he more than compensated for that with greatly increased volume. In the early 1990s Madoff Securities was reputed to be responsible for almost 10 percent of the daily trading of New York Stock Exchange-listed securities. By the end of the decade the company was the sixth largest market maker on Wall Street. That strategy had made Madoff rich, and had enabled him to become one of the most respected men in the financial industry. He marketed himself as a cofounder of NASDAQ and had served as its chairman; he was a prominent New York philanthropist and a member of numerous industry and private boards and committees. Thierry might have been born with royal blood, but Bernie Madoff was a Wall Street king.
 
Frank Casey had never heard anything about Bernie Madoff managing money, though. But even more unusual was the arrangement between Access and Madoff. As Thierry explained, “I opened an account with Madoff Securities and he gets to use the money any way he wants. I’ve given him full discretion to put my client’s money with his personal money when it’s needed.”
 
“So basically you’re loaning him the money, right?” Frank asked.
 
Thierry agreed, pointing out, “It’s secured by his good name.” In other words, if you couldn’t trust Bernie Madoff with your money, then there was no one who could be trusted. Madoff’s investment strategy was a technique known as split-strike conversion, a strategy that Frank knew a lot about—and knew that by design it would produce only limited profits. There was nothing unique or exotic about the split-strike conversion strategy. Option traders often referred to it as a “collar” or “bull spread.” Basically, it involved buying a basket of stocks, in Madoff’s case 30 to 35 blue-chip stocks that correlated very closely to the Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 100-stock index, and then protecting the stocks with put options. By bracketing an investment with puts and calls, you limit your potential profit if the market rises sharply; but in return you’ve protected yourself against devastating losses should the market drop. The calls created a ceiling on his gains when the market went up; the puts provided a floor to cut his losses when the market went down. As Thierry explained, Madoff had a big advantage: “He determines what stocks to buy or sell based upon his knowledge of the market and his order flow.” In other words, he would use the knowledge gained from his role as the middleman in stock trades, which sounded suspiciously like insider trading. Although this was the first time this possibility was raised, we were to hear variations of that claim numerous times in the following years. It was a convenient way of explaining the inexplicable. But however he was doing it, according to Thierry it worked extremely well: “This guy produces about one percent or more every month with almost no downside.”
 
Frank shook his head. Almost a quarter century earlier he’d been working with a young math whiz from MIT named Chuck Werner who was creating new option strategies in his living room. Options were a brand-new business, and Werner was using a PDP 11, a computer about the size of a four-drawer filing cabinet, to figure out what could be done with them. One of those strategies turned out to be the split-strike conversion. Although he’d been in that living room, Frank didn’t consider himself an expert on that strategy; but he claimed he knew enough about options to be dangerous. And in all the years since then he’d never heard of anybody consistently producing such substantial returns from a split-strike strategy. The 12 percent annual return was possible in some years; it was the consistent 1 percent a month return—month after month almost without exception, no matter how the market moved—that concerned him. A split-strike strategy certainly wasn’t without risk. There were bound to be times when it lost money, much more than was implied by the results he had seen. How could Madoff possibly still be making a profit whether the market went up or down? But Thierry seemed to have an answer for every question. To prove to Frank that Madoff’s returns were real, Thierry handed him several sheets of paper listing sales confirmations, explaining, “I get reports every day of which positions are bought, which are sold, and which options are purchased and which are sold.” It was all the usual data: On this date he’d bought this many shares of this stock at this price. On that date he’d sold that many shares of that stock at that price. Frank had seen thousands of these confirmations in his career, enough to know that they contained very little real information. It was like opening the hood of a car and looking at the engine. All that confirmed was that there was an engine, but there was no evidence that it ran, or what horsepower it generated, or even if it was powered by seawater. The only thing these papers confirmed was that Madoff was producing paperwork. Frank wondered what Access did with these reports when it received them.

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