Today, my podcast guest is Ike Sorkin.

The name will be familiar to many of you.

Ike has had a long and storied career, starting at the SEC and the Department of Justice,

and then later as White Collar Criminal Defense Council.

He's probably best known for representation of two clients, Bernie Madoff and Jordan Belford.

Belfort was played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the Wolf of Wall Street.

So Ike, thank you for joining me.

My pleasure.

I thought we could approach this by comparing the two defendants that you represented.

Their financial crimes differ in nature and in scope.

Madoff was the architect of the largest Ponzi scheme in history, and Belfort was responsible for a so-called

pump-and-dump trading scheme. Can you describe those schemes for those of us who aren't experts

in investor fraud? They are very, very different. The Ponzi scheme has been around for decades,

and it's a very simple scheme. You take money from an individual or an entity, and you promise them

exorbitant returns, and I don't mean to play up exorbitant, but much higher than the market.

And what you then do is take that money, go to the next person, make the promise to the

next person that you're going to be able to beat the market by a number of percentage points,

and you take money from that second person.

When it comes time to pay back the first person, you're using the money obtained from the second person.

And it keeps going on and on and on and on and it can go on and on infinitely as long as the market goes up.

When the market goes down, and people don't want to give you money, and those who have given you money want their money back,

or at least the principal, plus all the returns that they've been promised,

...