The nytimes.com article overviews Walter Noel, one of the investors in Madoff's Ponzi scheme.
An excerpt from the article:
People in the industry continue to question Fairfield’s due
diligence. Michael Markov, a hedge fund consultant, said that he was
hired by a fund two years ago to look into Fairfield Sentry’s returns and found that it was “statistically impossible to replicate them,” he said.
Mr.
Markov said that he found only one hedge fund whose returns correlated
to Mr. Madoff’s. That was the Bayou fund, which was prosecuted by the
government for fraud in 2006.