jim simons hired a researcher who suspected the fund was a scam. he spent a month secretly checking its prices against the wall street journal. nick patterson arrived while medallion was enjoying its third straight year of returns above 33%. the firm said it managed $100 million. its research operation was upstairs in an old house, and the computer model was making money in ways even its creators didn't fully understand. patterson ended up squeezing a desk into a corner of simons' office. "Mathematicians can be crooks, too," he said. so he wrote down the closing prices used for the fund's positions and checked them against the newspaper, line by line. the numbers checked out. only then did he turn his full attention to the research.