Guest Blogger: James Grippando, author of “Need You Now”

Jan 14, 2012

James Grippando is the New York Times best-selling author of nineteen previous novels. He lives in Florida, where he was a trial lawyer. Here, he talks about the inspiration for his latest thriller, Need You Now. 

Of course it was too good to be true:  A Wall Street whiz whose performance was the statistical equivalent of a baseball player batting .962 for ten years running.  Just days before his arrest, Bernard Madoff notified investors that they had about $ 68 billion in their accounts.  In reality, his giant Ponzi scheme was down to its last few hundred thousand dollars.  The stunning collapse in December 2008 left bankers, lawyers, regulators, and victims asking the same question:  where did all that money go?

Some of America’s brightest legal minds were immediately on the trail.  This past July, Securities Investor Protection Act Trustee Irving Picard announced a billion-dollar settlement of a so-called “feeder fund” case, bringing the total recovery for Madoff’s victims to $ 8.6 billion.  In Picard’s case, it was enough to ask who should have known that Madoff was a fraud.  As a thriller writer, I asked the bigger question:  who knew? 

For years critics voiced skepticism about Madoff.  Whistleblowers laid out dozens of “red flags.”  The entire law-enforcement arm of the U.S. government—tireless teams of federal agents who dedicated their careers to fighting complex financial crimes—was really just a bunch of bumbling fools who couldn’t sniff out a Ponzi scheme that was under their regulatory nose. 

Or so the world was led to believe. 

I found it hard to believe that Madoff was policed by the Wall Street version of Keystone Kops.  My original question—who knew?—took a sharper focus:  who in our own government knew?  And why didn’t they do anything to stop it?

Those questions are at the heart of Need You Now. It’s a step beyond the familiar premise of a cover up that is worse than the crime, though surely the fallout would be bad enough if the American public were to find out that its government knew about Madoff and let it happen.  But, what if the highest levels of government actually wanted it to happen, in furtherance of another agenda?  What if the Madoff losses were simply acceptable collateral damage in a larger financial war?

I’m not arguing the U.S. government understood the scope of Madoff’s fraud—between $ 18 billion and $ 60 billion.  But that only makes the posited government miscalculations all the more ruinous…and makes the thrill ride in Need You Now even more compelling.