Markopolos is the guy who figured out Bernard Madoff. He did it by calculating Madoff’s the impossibility of his returns: nearly identical positive payoffs for 77 months, regardless of the performance of the market. He tracked Madoff for years and reported him to the SEC at least three times. While Markopolos is more than a little full of himself and repetitive, his indictment of the SEC’s ineptitude is rewarding. Likewise, his underlying suggestion that human greed will lead investors to continue to believe the impossible even when presented with credible evidence of fraudulence makes for an exceptional cautionary tale.