Witness Against Mets" Owners Impressed Authorities With Her Credibility In the spring of 2003, Noreen Harrington, a 20-year veteran of Wall Street, picked up the telephone and called the office of Eliot Spitzer, then the New York attorney general, with a tip. Harrington told Spitzer's investigators that something was wrong with the trades at Canary Capital Partners, a Secaucus, N.J.-based hedge fund managed by Edward J. Stern, her former employer. The information - that some fund managers were engaged in "late trading," giving them an advantage over other, often smaller, investors - tore the cover off the practice of market-timing in mutual funds. It wound up being the biggest scandal to hit what was then a $7 trillion mutual fund industry, and Spitzer's subsequent investigations resulted in billions in fines and settlements. "When she first laid out the issues, we were skeptical of it because of the magnitude and brazenness of it," Spitzer said in a phone interview Thursday. But it turned out to be true. If Noreen said there's a tornado coming, I'd take cover. That same year, it turns out, Harrington said she told another audience a different storm was coming. Harrington, having been hired as the chief investment officer by a hedge fund founded in part by the owners of the Mets, said she warned the owners about investing further with Bernard L. Madoff. According to court documents, the owners, Fred Wilpon and his brother-in-law Saul Katz, had told Harrington they had invested with Madoff for years and were looking to invest more money with him. Harrington, according to court documents, decided to check the men's investing history with Madoff. No one, she said, had ever meaningfully done substantial due diligence on Madoff's brokerage. Her research, she testified, showed that Madoff's "numbers were too good." "One of the things I've relied on in my past, in my career," she said, "is numbers don't often lie; people can." Wilpon, Katz and others with the firm discounted her concerns, Harrington said, and continued to invest with Madoff. Five years later, Madoff was arrested by federal agents and eventually pleaded guilty to the largest fraud in Wall Street history. The team's owners were out hundreds of millions of dollars. In the next two weeks, Harrington will be asked to tell her tale under oath in federal court as one of the lead witnesses in an effort by the court-appointed trustee for Madoff's victims to force Wilpon and Katz to return hundreds of millions of dollars. Harrington's story, according to the trustee, will help show that Wilpon and Katz ignored warnings or other "red flags" about Madoff's legitimacy over their many years of investing with him. Instead, the trustee charges, Wilpon and Katz were addicted to his healthy returns, and their other businesses, including the Mets, were critically fueled by their Madoff profits. Lawyers for Wilpon and Katz have said their memory of Harrington's actions are fuzzy. They insist, though, that Harrington never showed them hard evidence of Madoff's fraud. And those claims - that they never were given any concrete reason to doubt Madoff's operation - will be at the heart of their effort to hang on to their millions. For one person to be a key player in two of the highest-profile financial scandals in recent memory is unusual, said Louis Clark, president of the Government Accountability Project, a Washington-based group that represents whistle-blowers. "She will be charged with grandstanding," Clark said of Harrington. There's no question about it. That's very often what happens when a whistle-blower comes forward. There are going to be naysayers. They'll find a way to make the whistle-blower the issue when in fact the whistle-blower wants the focus to be the problem. Harrington, who today works at M.D. Sass, a New York-based investment management firm, declined to be interviewed for this article, saying in an e-mail, "I am under a federal subpoena, and take my responsibility seriously." When Harrington first called the New York attorney general's office in 2003, she said that she had heard traders bragging about the practice of "late trading" and that she had tried to alert executives at the firm to the practice. Investigators rely heavily on whistle-blowers, Spitzer said, calling tips like Harrington's the lifeblood of his office. Harrington, he said, was a striking truth-teller. "She not only had a level of credibility in her résumé," Spitzer said. Everything she said came back with precise corroboration. The case became public in September 2003, when Spitzer announced a settlement with Stern. A wave of similar cases against mutual fund executives followed. Investigators handling the market-timing cases struggled for months to keep Harrington's identity secret, Spitzer said. Three months after the market-timing scandal news broke, Harrington came forward after inquiries from reporters. "She didn't want to be in the media," Spitzer said. "We asked her a few times: "Why did you do this? Why did you come forward? She just cares about issues like this. Harrington told The New York Times in 2003, "I'm fully aware that a lot of doors will close for me, but I can live with what I did." She continued to work in finance, focused on hedge funds. In an April 2009 issue of Bay Watch News, a magazine based in Bonita Springs, Fla., Harrington wrote an account of her experience with Madoff and the owners of the Mets titled "My Almost "Weekend with Bernie." " "A few months ago, it seemed like it was déjà vu all over again!" she wrote, adding: "Scandal over? In the article, Harrington said that not long after she joined the firm, the Mets" owners insisted that she invest outside investors" money in a Madoff fund. "They had invested hundreds of millions of their own money with him and would be able to get access to his fund which was not available to others," she wrote. I said I would be glad to take this opportunity to invest, but I could find no records to show that any due diligence had been done. Not to worry, we know him and his returns are like clockwork. Well, I insisted, I wanted to see the clock before I put any of my clients in the fund. Unfortunately, no one was allowed to meet with the Wizard. Harrington said she then did her best to at least attempt some due diligence. It soon became apparent that Madoff's "returns could be fiction," she said. Harrington's next meeting with the Mets" owners "turned into a rather heated argument," she said. "This was a major personal insult to them that I would not invest the funds of the outside investors," she said. After many less than veiled threats about my future, I walked out of the meeting, packed up my office and walked away.