[ by Melanie Gretchen ] An investment with Bernie Madoff caught the eye of then-chief investment officer of a hedge fund owned in part by the owners of the New York Mets.  The CIO also was a former Goldman Sachs executive. After reviewing Bernie's near perfect investment performance, Noreen Harrington concluded that Bernie was either breaking the law or making up his stock trading entirely. She shared her insights with her bosses, that included Mets owner Saul Katz.  Despite her recommendation that the fund divest itself of the Madoff investment, those in attendance discounted her suspicions and rejected her suggestion. Harrington Testimony. Within the court filings made last week ahead of the 3/19/12 start of Katz and Wilpon's trial in federal court, Ms. Harrington said Katz rejected what she had to say.  He and his brother-in-law, Fred Wilpon, had invested much of their personal fortunes into Madoff's operation, and had been reaping profits from those investments for decades.  In addition, Madoff was a personal friend. At the time, he got "visibly angry" and rejected her caution.  She said she could not be a party to investing in Madoff and resigned. The Conversation Between Ms. Harrington and Katz. In 2003, she was the whistle-blower who tipped off Eliot Spitzer, then the New York State attorney general, to illegal trading in mutual funds by traders at another of her former employers, the Hartz Group.  This led to a wider investigation and a shake-up in the mutual fund industry. In 2002, she hired by Sterling Stamos, a hedge fund founded by Wilpon, Katz, and a rising star in the investment world, Peter Stamos.  In the summer of 2003, the hedge fund was considering investing with J. Ezra Merkin, a hedge fund manager who, a civil fraud case claims, as directing must of his clients' money to Madoff to make Merkin's returns Madoff's returns. When she met with Merkin, she said he was not cooperative, testifying he said, "You don't get it, do you?  This is a privilege.  You don't get to ask questions."  When she related her conversation with Merkin to Katz, Katz asked her, "What do you think Madoff does with the money?" to which she replied, if not "front-running," a form of insider trading, which is illegal, then "fiction."  With 20 years in the hedge fund industry, his numbers didn't add up: she couldn't figure out his math. After he pointed out that she could be wrong then as she had been before, she admitted she had no proof except her expert opinion.  She was ignored when she requested to Katz to meet with Madoff to do the due diligence necessary to make the investment with Merkin work.  She left when she discovered after the meeting that her superiors would go ahead with the investment she warned them against. Katz's Response. When asked under oath about Ms. Harrington and her warnings, he said he had no memory of any meeting or any warning.  Instead, he attributed her departure to the fact that she was "one angry lady, disruptive in the office, and as I recall, when she left she was even some sort of a whistle-blower and didn't have good relationships wherever she was." Currently, she is at M.D. Sass, an investment firm. Katz and Wilpon Trial. Next month, they will stand trial on charges that they improperly benefited from their relationship with Madoff over years of investing with him, and of ignoring evidence he might have been engaged in wrongdoing.  Their lawyers said Ms. Harrington's account, contained in a deposition given last December, is "suspect and entirely unsubstantiated," criticizing her testimony for its lack of concrete proof. For more details, go to [NYTimes, 2/11].