The Wall Street Journal Blew a Chance to Expose Madoff

[Donnachaidh]

http://garyweiss.blogspot.com/2009/02/wall-street-journal-blew-chance-to.html

A bombshell is buried in Harry Markopolos' prepared testimony to a House panel today: he contacted the Wall Street Journal on the Bernie Madoff fraud three years ago, and the newspaper did nothing.

It seems that the Journal missed an opportunity to achieve one of the biggest scoops ever, win a Pulitzer Prize and all that other good stuff--and extinguish the biggest fraud in financial history.

Markpolos says as follows:

put me in contact with John Wilke, senior investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal's Washington bureau. Mr. Wilke and I would become friends over the next three years. Unfortunately, as eager as Mr. Wilke was to investigate the Madoff story, it appears that the Wall Street Journal's editors never gave him approval to start investigating. As you will see from my extensive e-mail correspondence with him over the next several months, there were several points in time in which he was getting ready to book air travel to start the story and then would get called off at the last minute. I never determined if the senior editors at the Wall Street Journal failed to authorize this investigation.

According to his timeline, he contacted the Journal in December 2005. The emails to which he alludes can be found here.


more at the link above --

[Bolo Boffin]

1. Maybe not "extinguish"...

...but certainly the victims might well have recovered a bit more of their deposits -- and people from that point on would not have lost money from his scheme.

So bad on the Wall Street Journal, but the real stink in all of this is how the SEC let Madoff skate after multiple tips. Whatever system let that happen needs to be fixed and if there's criminality, it needs to be prosecuted.

[DJ13]

2. The WSJ has always been a supporter of the financial elite

That they refused to run such an expose shouldnt surprise anyone.

I bet they even tipped off Madoff about the info Markpolos presented to them.

[Kolesar]

3. WSJ was founded to shed some daylight and prevent underhanded stock price manipulation

Which is not the same matter as Madoff, but it was a role of "crusading journalism".

[NashVegas]

4. The Bankrofts Were Running It Then

I wonder how well they knew Bernie.

[swag]

5. k&r