Richard Behar

Behar’s groundbreaking book “Madoff: The Final Word—published in 2024 by Simon & Schuster—exposes complicity and wrongdoing by the con man’s family members, who are routinely portrayed elsewhere as innocent victims. Behar also established that the fraud began in the early 1960s, when Madoff started on Wall Street. His relationship with Madoff began in 2011. By the time Bernie died in 2021, he had sent Behar over 300 emails and letters, participated in 50 phone conversations, and sat for three in-person jailhouse interviews—a level of access provided to no other reporter. Behar established relationships with hundreds of regulators, prosecutors, FBI agents, and others, and was aided by more than 100 pages of confidential FBI documents. His multimedia presentation—shocking, riveting and at times absurdly funny—is not to be missed. Behar also lays out the latest frauds, including AI scams, and how people and companies can protect themselves.

Richard Behar speaks about what businesses and governments are doing (and not doing) to secure computers, which is essential to national security given that we all are now interconnected. He wrote a definitive story for Forbes magazine (May 2016) about a clandestine cybersecurity military squad in Israel called “Unit 8200.” Behar explains why the unit is “probably the best school in the world for entrepreneurship.” He also wrote a cover story for Forbes about under-the-radar ventures in high-tech between Israelis and Palestinians.
Behar’s expertise in cybersecurity dates to 1997, when he was ahead of the curve on the subject of email security—with a cover story in Fortune magazine called Who’s Reading Your Email. For this award-winning exposé, which was used in college computer classrooms, Behar enlisted top-flight former Air Force computer security experts to hack a Fortune 500 company—with the firm’s permission—to show how easy it was to do. He also spent days with one of the country’s most notorious computer hackers for a profile, soon after the hacker’s home was raided by Secret Service.
Just after 9-11, Behar exposed a radical Arab website based in Texas, which had links to the Hamas terrorist group, that was raided by federal agents five days before the 9-11 attack. He then flew to Pakistan, where he reported two award-winning pieces (for Fortune and CNN), one of which studied the movement of money by radical groups throughout the banking world. Behar was also invited by the Prime Minister’s Office in Israel for a private tour of that country’s “Cyber City,” a collection of buildings rising up from a desert city that may become the world’s #1 hub for cybersecurity—both for businesses and governments. He has also been gathering data on how social media companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google and YouTube are facilitating global jihad.

How can Western businesses work and compete in today’s Russia—a country where some of the hottest trends are still intellectual-property “squatting,” raiding companies with armed private-security forces, “commissioning” criminal prosecutions for competitive advantages, and engaging in collusive litigation? How can investors learn what is truly going on in a country where 27 journalists have been contract murdered since 2000, when Putin came to power? (Only two of those cases have received full justice, with five cases receiving partial justice. The masterminds almost always walk free.) Behar’s award-winning articles on organized crime inside Russia’s metals trade are widely considered the most penetrating examinations ever done of Russia’s second-largest export industry. He will offer step-by-step advice on how investors can try and avoid the pitfalls, as well as demonstrate how Russian organized crime groups are morphing into transnational corporations—and why all we better be worried about it. He can also discuss “Project Klebnikov,” the investigative media alliance he launched after the 2004 murder in Moscow of Forbes editor Paul Klebnikov.