Aug. 11 (Bloomberg) -- Bernard Madoff, the Ponzi scheme meister, isn’t the kind of guy who wins charm contests. Just ask a prospective client who came calling one day in the 1990s.

The investor, curious about how Madoff worked his magic, took out pen and pad and started to take notes. The wizard’s response was brutal, writes Erin Arvedlund in “Too Good to Be True,” describing how Madoff “ripped the man’s notebook out of his hands and threw it on the floor.”

“No notes!” he shouted before storming out of the room, she writes. And then, like all the other stooges who fell for Madoff, the guy entrusted his money to the Ponzi man anyway, according to this comprehensive account.

Madoff was a master of controlling people. He pulled the strings of his clients, his employees and even the hapless regulators who dozed while he operated his $65 billion Ponzi scheme, the biggest in U.S. history.

One person beyond his control was Arvedlund, who started raising questions about how Madoff got his remarkable returns in a Barron’s article back in 2001. Her findings, sad to say, were largely ignored. Eight years later, she will no doubt gain a more attentive audience.

Her book suffers from spots of repetition and meandering that might have been repaired in a less heated publishing schedule. At times, it’s unclear whether she sought comment from the people she criticizes. Nor has she mastered the art of blending details and conversations into a smooth narrative.

Other Madoff Titles

We do, however, get some good reporting from the journalist who was there first, giving her book an edge over two other Madoff titles just out, “Betrayal” by Andrew Kirtzman (Harper) and “Madoff With the Money” by Jerry Oppenheimer (Wiley).

Arvedlund also spares us the breathless kind of writing that works too hard to beef up the drama. Goodness knows that there’s enough Sturm und Drang in the facts about the con man sentenced to 150 years in prison for taking money from new clients to pay earlier investors.

There are many outrages in the book, and it will get you mad all over again about how Bernie kept the scheme going for so long. The book appears in the same month that the inspector general of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is expected to publish his report telling us how on earth the agency missed such a massive fraud even as it was getting detailed, credible tips that Madoff was a crook.

SEC Thanks Madoff

Arvedlund describes how Madoff slipped into a cozy relationship with the SEC in the 1970s and ‘80s, when the agency was pushing to get a computerized market up and running. She unearths a former SEC lawyer who says agency insiders spoke of him in respectful, “hushed tones.” Madoff even got a thank-you letter from the agency in 1987 because he stayed open during the October stock-market crash.

These and other assertions hardly paint a pretty picture of the nation’s financial cops. SEC spokesman John Heine, reached by phone, declined to comment on them.

Equally unsettling are Arvedlund’s descriptions of the many people who made lots of dough while doing business with the man scheming up in Manhattan’s Lipstick Building, so dubbed because of its red granite coloring and cylindrical shape.

As Arvedlund tells the story, Madoff pulled off his scam largely because he kept so many people fat and happy. So-called feeder funds that brought him business garnered hundreds of millions of dollars in fees, she writes, so it was hardly in their interests to kick his tires too hard.

Upstairs, Downstairs

By his own account, Madoff carefully segregated his fraud on the 17th floor from what he called the “legitimate” proprietary trading and market-making units that his brother and sons ran on the 18th and 19th floors. Arvedlund does a good job of telling how things worked on the various floors, right down to wife Ruth’s obsession with locking her 19th-floor office even before quick trips to the restroom.

She also discusses the role of Frank DiPascali, chief financial officer at Madoff’s investment advisory operation, who pleaded guilty today to 10 crimes related to Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. DiPascali was an abrasive man who padded his resume, the author says.

Essential to the fraud was Madoff’s old clunker of a computer, an IBM AS/400 that he and select other employees could use to manipulate prices, the book says.

“Madoff and other employees on 17 punched in the stock prices on the IBM AS/400 and would just enter stock prices that would square with his fake returns,” Arvedlund says, after inexplicably telling us one page earlier that “no one touched” the computer but Madoff.

You’ll learn a lot by reading “Too Good to Be True.” One solemn message is that there are a lot of crooked rich people. Another is that there are a lot of dumb rich people, too.

“Too Good to Be True: The Rise and Fall of Bernie Madoff” is from Portfolio in the U.S. (310 pages, $25.95). It will be available in the U.K. this September as a Penguin paperback (320 pages, 9.99 pounds).

(Susan Antilla is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this review: Susan Antilla in New York at santilla@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: August 11, 2009 16:50 EDT