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Abstract: Analysts looking from the outside of the Madoff investment group waved any number of “red flags ” about the non-transparency of Madoff investments. The inference from non-transparency to investor danger flows from a thesis associated with Max Weber that capitalist rationality presupposes the expert bookkeeper. Madoff’s criminality and the subsequent scandal opened records so we can read what the participants inside the investment group believed that kept them from heeding the warnings. They believed that Madoff was sharing with them the not-so-legal gains he made in a non-transparent context. The Weber thesis interpreted as individual rationality presupposes a reciprocity principle because without this reciprocity, non-transparency would not deter those who believe themselves, or their leader, to be more capable in a non-transparent strategic context than others. The disconnection between analysts and participants comes partly from the analysts ’ specification of reclusive agent in which someone might steal for himself but not for others. To help explain the choices of the Madoff investors, we return to an older vie