In a world where data analytics matter more and more, there’s information you can only get through the human connection.
On December 11, 2008, two FBI agents knocked on the door of a Manhattan apartment to interview a man and were invited inside. One of the agents asked the man: “We’re here to find out if there’s an innocent explanation”. The man replied: “There’s no innocent explanation”. That man, of course, was Bernie Madoff, who ran the largest investor Ponzi scheme of all time. Madoff went on to tell Special Agents Ted Cacioppi and B.J. Kang that he had paid investors with money that wasn't there, that he was broke and insolvent, and that he expected to go to jail.
Unfortunately, very few interviews play out like this. That is why our work leading up to the interview, and how we conduct the interview itself, matter so much. And as we’ll see in Madoff’s case, even though he confessed at the beginning of that interview, he was only partially truthful in the rest of it. As we prepare for our October Lunch and Learn “Beyond Suspicious Indicators: The Anatomy of an Investigation Interview”, we’ll use this case and two others as examples for how real-life interviews can go, and the tools we can use to get to the truth.
It was 10:00pm on November 5, 1992, and FBI Special Agent Brian Shepard planned to stop by the house for five minutes to hook a recorder to the phone line and capture an extortion call against Mark Whitacre, a rising executive at agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). Mark answered the door, introduced Brian to his wife Ginger, and led Brian to the phone. Mark noted Brian seemed even more nervous than he did the previous night he met him. After Brian installed the device and left the house, he was almost at his car when Mark (at Ginger’s urging) stopped him and asked to talk for a minute. The resulting conversation in Brian’s car lasted around 4 hours. Mark started by asking whether he could be prosecuted if he shared information, but Brian said he couldn’t make any promises. Brian used silence and natural, open-ended follow-up questions, while noticing Mark was talking more like a potential target than a victim. Mark confessed the extortion story was a lie and laid out one of the biggest price-fixing schemes in corporate history. Brian had never been involved in a price-fixing investigation and didn’t even know if the FBI handled those cases, but Brian kept the conversation going and took notes. Brian also got Mark to tell him who at the company was directing Mark to lie, setting the stage for Mark to become an FBI informant against his own company. ADM later plead guilty and paid a $100 million dollar fine, which at the time was the largest criminal antitrust fine.
On November 24, 2016, Thanksgiving morning, a woman was found along I-5, 146 miles south of where she had gone missing while jogging 22 days earlier. Sherri Papini told detectives she had been abducted and held by two Hispanic women, and she had the injuries to back up her story, including a brand. She even said she had pulled out a tuft of her own hair at the abduction site so her husband would know where she was taken. The story fell apart when male DNA on her clothing led investigators to her ex-boyfriend, who told them what really happened. Looking back, Shasta County Sheriff's Detective Kyle Wallace said, “A lot of the lies that she told us had a lot of truth to it. So it's really hard to decipher.” Wallace said details like the tuft of hair were "theatrical and not really what fit what she said in her story," and that her theatrics were "really part of the undoing." On August 13, 2020, an FBI agent and a Shasta County detective sat down with Sherri and warned her up front that lying to a federal agent is a crime. Later in the interview, they warned her again and laid out the DNA and phone evidence showing she had been with her ex-boyfriend. The lie became its own crime, as Sherri had also collected payments from the California Victim Compensation Board as a "victim”. In April 2022, she plead guilty to mail fraud and making false statements to federal agents. She was sentenced to 18 months in prison and ordered to pay $309,902 in restitution.
Back to Bernie Madoff. After his opening confession, Madoff talked with Agents Cacioppi and Kang for about an hour before he was arrested. But just because somebody confessed to a crime doesn’t mean they tell the truth about what happened. Madoff insisted he was the only person who knew about the fraud, and when he described how the scheme worked, he started lying about the mechanics of it. He also refused to testify against anyone. Luckily, that wasn’t the end of the case. Investigators built the case the hard way and turned to the people who worked for Madoff. Frank DiPascali, Madoff's longtime right-hand man, began cooperating in 2009, and his six weeks of trial testimony proved essential. In the end, 14 people were charged, including Madoff's own brother Peter, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
We will go over the lessons from these cases and teach you how you can confidently conduct your own investigation interviews at our Lunch and Learn on October 15, 2026, at 12:00pm PDT. Click here to sign up to join us on Zoom and earn 1 CPE, and we hope to see you there!
Sources
Mark Whitacre
Sherri Papini
Bernie Madoff
- United States v. Bernard L. Madoff, Criminal Complaint, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, December 2008.
- "Bernie Madoff," FBI History: Famous Cases and Criminals, Federal Bureau of Investigation.
- Ross, Brian. Excerpt from The Madoff Chronicles, ABC News, September 28, 2009.
- "FBI Agent Testifies in Fraud Trial of 5 Former Madoff Employees," CBS New York, October 21, 2013.
