A man reported Madoff’s scheme 10 years prior to his confession.

For 10 years, no one would listen to the local man who said he had proof that a billion-dollar Ponzi scheme was being committed.

NewsCenter 5′s Liz Brunner reported that hundreds, if not thousands of people, lost their money — in some cases, all they had.

Harry Markopolos has written a new book about tracking Bernie Madoff.

Markopolos spoke to Brunner about his book, the numerous attempts to get the Securities and Exchange Commission’s attention and how he feared for his life.

“We did everything we could to stop this man, and the government just didn’t care,” Markopolos said.

Markopolos is the whistleblower who blew the lid off the biggest Ponzi scheme in history.

Bernie Madoff had swindled more than $65 billion from investors around the world. Markopolos and his team took on Madoff, one of the most powerful men on Wall Street. It turned Markopolos’ life into a decade-long nightmare. He said he feared for his life.

“If Madoff was preying on the Russian Mafia, and the drug cartels, he was playing a very dangerous game,” he said. “And if he knew I had a team in the field tracking him across two continents, I knew what was going to happen to me, and my team.”

In “No One Would Listen,” Markopolos outlines how his mission changed his life.

“I’d been living under a death sentence, terrified that my pursuit of Madoff would put my family and me in jeopardy. So I wouldn’t start my car without first checking under the chassis and in the wheel wells. At night, I walked away from shadows and I slept with a loaded gun nearby,” he said.

Markopolos said he even thought about killing Madoff himself if his probe was ever exposed.

Unexpectedly, it all ended last March. Madoff turned himself in, pleading guilty to 11 felonies. He’s now serving 150 years in prison.

“I knew my nightmare was over,” he said. “If we had known that this case was going to turn out to be this bad, we would have never gotten involved. It was just too dangerous to stop. You had to go forward.”

Markopolos went to the Securities and Exchange Commission five times, and each time he said they did nothing.

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