With the Black Hawk pitched at a forty-five-degree angle astride the wall, the crew sent a distress call to the idling Chinooks.

NEWYORKER: Getting Bin Laden

Within five minutes, Markopolos sensed that the returns had to be fictional, and he became sure of it when he plotted on a graph the rising quarterly gains, year after year, and wound up with a virtually straight forty-five-degree angle.

NEWYORKER: Noble Creatures