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Is it worth $10? Yes
“Chasing Madoff” is a taut, gripping, suspenseful story about a group of men from Boston--Frank Casey, Neil Chelo, and most notably, Harry Markopolos—who spent a decade taking down Wall Street titan Bernie Madoff. Along the way, threats are made, phone conversations are recorded, guns are bought, Markopolos checks for bombs under his car, and the trio go to the press to get the story out so the world can know. They figure that once the story is in print, the SEC will take over and do its job and they can go back to living normal lives.
Sounds like something that John Grisham or Tom Clancy would cook up, right? And it is, except that this isn’t based on a novel. As the film states in the very beginning, this is, sadly, based on a true story.
The central figure in this documentary is Harry Markopolos. In 1999 he got word from Frank Casey that a certain financial manager in New York City was generating revenue streams that were too good to be true. He did the math, re-checked it, and even had his colleague Neil Chelo do another check. The numbers didn’t lie. It was fraud. And come to find out, the fraud was being perpetrated by Bernie Madoff, one of the biggest names on Wall Street.
“Chasing Madoff” then chronicles the stressful, difficult, ten year struggle of Markopolos to get the truth out while keeping himself and his family safe. As a former military man, he knows how to handle weapons. He even buys pistols that he keeps on him at all times for protection. At one point, Markopolos reveals that some days are light days and some days are heavy days, depending on where he is going. He prefers to stay in his home state of Massachusetts, since that is the only state where his gun permit is valid. In one chilling revelation, he says that he and his wife had a plan where if there was ever a noise at the front door, he would go down to investigate while she remained at the top of the stairs. If anyone tried to come up the stairs who wasn’t him, she was to keep firing until she ran out of bullets.
These are the extremes that Markopolos was put into due to his investigation of Madoff. The other people helping him were safer, their names weren’t out there. It was up to him to stay alive and protect his family. Some may say that the threat he felt may have been in his head, but it doesn’t matter. To him, it was very real, and he’d rather be proactive and take protective measures, rather than be ambushed and not be prepared.
“Chasing Madoff” may be a documentary, and it is done in the documentary style—interviews, archive footage, recreations, etc.—but the story that unfolds is every bit as nail-biting as a Hollywood thriller. And the film also does a great job of showing the fallout from Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. There are interviews with some of the victims of Madoff’s treachery—in a nice touch, they are identified by account numbers rather than names—and footage from the congressional hearing of the SEC to determine why they didn’t see what was happening a decade earlier and put a stop to it. The answers, such as they are, are not very good.
Anyone who follows the news knows that Madoff went down and Markopolos became an international hero—a word that he doesn’t like. His reasons for not seeing himself as a hero are understandable ones, but I respectfully disagree. Anyone with the nerve to do what he did and go through what he went through—something that 99 percent of the population would not do—deserves to be called a hero. My hope for Markopolos is that he one day sees things that way too.
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