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By Nicole Powers

Harry Markopolos has a way with numbers. It’s this innate ability that led him to uncover Bernie Madoff’s epic Ponzi scheme almost a decade before market forces ultimately leveraged a confession out of the spectacularly crooked investment fund manager.

In 1999, while working as a portfolio manager at Rampart, a Boston based investment management company, Markopolos had been asked to reverse engineer a fund offered by Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC so his firm could compete by offering a similar product. After studying Madoff’s marketing material for a mere 5 minutes, Markopolos realized that the results the fund claimed to achieve were highly improbable, a further 4 hours of mathematical modeling proved the stated returns were categorically impossible by legal means.

Smelling a rat, Markopolos assembled an informal investigative team to probe Madoff’s operation further. In May 2000, when Madoff’s scheme was only a $3 to $7 billion fraud, they submitted their first whistleblowing report to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). It was summarily ignored. Frustrated but undeterred, Markopolos’ tenacious group, dubbed The Foxhounds, submitted numerous subsequent memos (in 2001, 2005, 2007 and 2008) offering even more evidence, to no avail. A 2005 missive had what one might consider to be an attention-grabbing title -“The World’s Largest Hedge Fund Is A Fraud” – but even this failed to get an appropriate response from those charged with policing Wall Street.

It was only following the crash of 2008, when Madoff’s investors were clamoring to liquidate their assets and he was unable to meet their demands, that the man responsible for the largest act of financial fraud in world history was forced to fess up. By then, Madoff’s “fund” had grown on paper to a value of $65 billion. In the following days, the complete and utter failure of the SEC came to light, as press outlets – who had also been alerted by Markopolos, but by and large had declined to report his findings before Madoff’s arrest – competed to interview the “Madoff whistleblower.” With egg on their faces, the government also sought out Markopolos’ knowledge and expertise, and on February 4, 2009 he delivered some riveting televised testimony in front of the House of Representatives’ Financial Services Subcommittee.

In March 2010, Markopolos published a book chronicling his investigations into Madoff and the utter incompetence he bore witness to during his dealings with the SEC. Called No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller, it became a New York Times bestseller. A new film, Chasing Madoff, based on the book is currently in cinemas. SuicideGirls caught up with Markopolos, who now works as a freelance investigative accountant exposing Fortune 500 wrongdoing, to talk about Madoff and the current state of play in our financial markets. We also asked him to focus his considerable financial acumen our nation’s balance sheet and assess the future prospects of our economy. Given Markopolos’ track record, his conclusions about America’s should-be junk status are indeed cause for concern, if not outright alarm.

Read our exclusive interview with Harry Markopolos on SuicideGirls.com.

by Aaron Colter

Alright. It’s back to the grind of shouting about changing our government to better suit the lives of the modern many.

I’ve posted a few times about Anonymous and LulzSec (even got a chance to write about how Alan Moore and David Llyod feel about their V for Vendetta mask being used as a symbol), as well as other groups that have taken actions against organizations that have restricted the freedom of speech or information in the world. In my opinion, the reaction of authorities in the United States and around the world to the actions of whistleblowers, data-leakers, online protestors, and those merely offering public support such as journalist Glenn Greenwald (who recently noted that President Obama’s handling of CIA operations are basically the same as George W. Bush) have been far too harsh (eg. threats of unreasonably long jail sentences for first-time and/or young offenders who dare to take a stand against authority, even if they’re within their rights), and worse, dangerous to the basic rights of individuals.

It’s already come out that the Justice Department helped Bank of America try to destroy Wikileaks, that the FBI targets non-threatening Americans for political beliefs, that the government gave $1.2 trillion in tax-payer money to major banks who continue foreclose on people (often illegally), which has horrible consequences on health beyond financial devastation, that the poor have a huge tax burden while social programs continue to be cut, and that the Obama administration is trying to push for a settlement against those that gambled us into a recession and the SEC is playing cover-up, all of this while military actions are literally wasting millions each day to perpetuate a system of violence in a region we are largely ignorant about, which results in billions being wasted at home on projects that do nothing to secure our freedoms or safety.

So, what’s to do be done? The U.S. government is clearly not operating in the best interests of the majority of its citizens, some of this due to incompetence and mismanagement, some due to corruption, some due to bigoted religious beliefs, and some because the two-party system doesn’t encourage actual representation. An armed revolt against our own country in the vein of Egypt will hurt millions and it’d take years to rebuild in the aftermath. Non-violent means of persuasion are therefore the best tactics available.

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by Aaron Colter

Did you miss me last week? No? Didn’t notice at all, huh. Well, fuck you. I’m back.

This shit on this list has been deemed cool by a panel of Internets.

1. Making Fun of President Barack Obama

I found about these comics on What Things Do from someone on Facebook who was talking to Tom Neely, who’s excellent The Wolf is now available and worth your money. Anyway, sorry guy-who’s-name-I-can’t-remember, you should get credit for finding these gems. The overall premise of making President Barack Obama wondering-mind leader like George W. Bush is strong, but I found only a few of the comics to be hilarious. Here they are:

• The President is a strong swimmer.
• What?
• The Jonas Brothers are not that important.
• That’s a good magazine.

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by Lily Suicide

On May 5, 1993, three young boys, Chris Byers, Michael Moore and Stevie Branch, were brutally murdered in the town of West Memphis, Arkansas. Grieving and looking for answers, the town allegedly bypassed evidence pointing at probable suspects. Instead, they prosecuted three teenage boys who were unconventional for the town of West Memphis. The boys, Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Miskelly, wore black and listened to heavy metal music. They would later come to be known as the West Memphis Three.

There was what many critics call a coerced confession from Jessie Misskelly, who had a below average IQ. Jessie Miskelly recanted his statement the next day, stating that he had been put under extreme pressure and psychological warfare by the West Memphis police, but by then it was too late and the fate of three young men rested uneasily in the hands of the judicial system. They were convicted of murder in early ’’94. Jessie Miskelly got life plus 40, Jason Baldwin received life without parole and Damien Echols – at only 18 years of age – was sentenced to death by lethal injection.

Luckily, there were cameras in the courtroom, and they were used for the making of the HBO documentary Paradise Lost. Burk Sauls first saw Paradise Lost in August of ’96. He watched it and watched it again. At the end he was always left with the same feeling that many other people were left with: “with a lot of empty spaces, unanswered questions and doubts.” Many people became angry after watching Paradise Lost. Burk Sauls, Kathy Bakken, and Grove Pashley decided to do something about it. They launched the WM3.org website and the West Memphis Three support group, as well as eventually appearing in the sequel to the first HBO documentary, Paradise Lost 2.

I caught up with Burk to talk about the case, as well as Damien Echols’ memoir Almost Home, written on death row.

Read our exclusive interview with Burk Sauls Of The West Memphis Three Support Group on SuicideGirls.com.