Wall Street Journal Book Review Slams Harry Markopolos. Why?
People in glass houses should not throw stones.
That simple piece of wisdom is both timeless and precious. Regrettably, too many in our media fail to uphold it. Where do I see evidence of it today?
The Wall Street Journal today runs a book review of Harry Markopolos’ recently released No One Would Listen. The reviewer is Richard J. Tofel of ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative-journalism newsroom. Tofel does not denigrate Harry’s work, but he emasculates Harry from a personal standpoint.
Tofel writes:
A crusading legislator who had made a considerable reputation following up on whistleblower charges once told me that nearly all the whistleblowers she had met shared two qualities. First, they were onto something-that is, there was at least some truth to what they were saying. Second, they were “a little bit nuts.” The jacket of “No One Would Listen” identifies Harry Markopolos as “the Madoff Whistleblower.” He would seem to fit the pattern.
The author of “No One Would Listen” is fond of describing himself as “slightly eccentric,” but he is not exactly self-aware. By his account, the fault for his having been ignored throughout eight years of warnings is everyone else’s. But that conclusion requires ignoring much of his story.
The possibility of self-interest probably heightened the skepticism of those he sought to persuade.
Mr. Markopolos tells us that for years, fearing for his own and his family’s safety, he checked for bombs under his car; he also carried a loaded gun and slept with it at his bedside. He did so because he believed-though he offers no evidence-that Mr. Madoff’s clients included Russian mobsters and Latin drug cartels. Even after Mr. Madoff had been jailed, Mr. Markopolos, a longtime Army reservist, feared that the SEC would invade his home, eager to capture and suppress evidence of the agency’s failings: “I loaded a 12-gauge pump shotgun with double-ought buckshot, attached six more rounds to the stock, and draped a bandolier of 20 more rounds on top of my locked gun cabinet. Next I got out an old army gas mask in case they used tear gas.”
None of this behavior makes Mr. Markopolos’s case against Mr. Madoff any less convincing. Nor does it excuse the SEC. But it does provide a fuller picture of the author than the cardboard cut-out of the lonely hero we’ve been hearing about for the past 15 months. With his book, Mr. Markopolos sheds more light than he intends on just why no one would listen.
Why does Tofel slam Harry and paint him as being a nut? Tofel writes in self-defense because he worked for 15 years, including two years as assistant publisher (2002-2004), at The Wall Street Journal, one of the periodicals which failed to pursue the lead on the Madoff story.
I think The Wall Street Journal is an outstanding periodical, but it is hardly perfect. As further evidence of questionable and selective journalism, I would share with my readers that in January 2009 when I unearthed the fact that Wall Street’s self-regulator FINRA owned $647 million in auction-rate securities, I brought those details initially to The Wall Street Journal. After ten days to two weeks of conversation with representatives of the WSJ, for whatever reason they chose not to pursue the story.
I then brought the news to Bloomberg, and to its credit a reporter there pursued the story and broke it late last April including the fact that FINRA liquidated its ARS holdings in mid-2007.
I share that tidbit not to draw attention to Sense on Cents, but rather to highlight that the media needs to be more demanding of itself in upholding its charge to pursue truth, transparency, and integrity everywhere on our economic landscape.
I do not expect The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Sense on Cents or ProPublica to be perfect, but they can be and should be a lot better than this slanderous drivel put forth by Mr. Tofel today.
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Broker Reviews
Forget head of SEC, we should make Harry President.
I love how the Wall Street smear team gets out there to discredit him. They would crap a brick if he ever were in the SEC, so they must make him look to be and idiot.
The reality is Cox was an idiot and Schaprio is not tough enough.
Put Harry in, save the country.
All too often, the WSJ shills for people like Madoff, instead of performing critical reporting. Like most institutions, especially financial ones, it has a hard time admitting it’s wrong. The fact that it’s now controlled by Rupert only reinforces this.
Add to the mix that the US investment industry is the glibbest in a country which equates skepticism with misanthropy, and the fact that Americans s*ck up to the wealthy and notable, and it’s easy to see how someone like Markopolos would be branded as a crank. “This Madoff guy is rich and has celebrity clients; who is this freak who speaks badly of him?”
That particular excerpt from the book does make Markopolos sound paranoid, but I think it is out of context. Elsewhere in the book, Markopolos talks about how his former boss Frank Casey had received death threats from shady clients in the past and how a whistleblower named Peter Scannell complained about a market-timing scam and then was nearly beaten to death with a brick. He had also been reading books about whistleblowers and he knew that it was not uncommon for people to attempt to silence them through intimidation or worse. With predecent like this, I don’t blame Markopolos for worrying about his safety and that of his family.
This is unfortunately typical of not just the media but (I suppose) opposition (and power holders) in general (duh). I’ve read Harry’s book and I enjoyed it. To say that the SEC (and other institutions) ignored Harry because he was abrasive is (like Laurel says) out of context. If you had been trying to tell people about a cure for caner for almost a decade, and the only people listening were finger painting toddlers, of course they would ignore you! I repect that Harry doesn’t want to be in the limelight now taht this is all over. Most people would take this opportunity to become a ‘celebrity’ of sorts, not Harry. He just wants to help the little guy, and if we had more people like that around, I douby we’d be as ***ed as we are now.
SAME OLD, SAME OLD! SHOOT THE MESSENGER!
The other questionable characteristic of Mr. Markopolos’ that Tofel seems to suggest excused the non-pursuit of his charges was that he had “self interest.” But wasn’t self interest, in essence, what he was charging? It seems a weak justification to question intentions in an environment of Wall Street investment management that is fueled by self-interest. (Self-interest on Wall Street, we remember, trumped even patriotism following September 2008, when “the best and brightest minds” could not be expected to stay in a firm that required them to sacrifice any bonus money in order to try and help their clients – and country – get out of harm’s way.
Well said. I liked the book. The Journal reports selectively, they are a business, owned by Rupert Murdoch.
Tofel’s saying that Markopolis was paranoid is particularly offensive. If Tofel were to have actually read the book he would have known that Markopolis was indeed out on a limb due to SEC & AG incompetence. And if Tofel were to have a clue as to the activities resulting in many offshore accounts he would know the investors aren’t boy scout troops.