FILE – Ivan F. Boesky, center, leaves federal court in New York, April 24, 1987 after pleading guilty to one count of violating federal securities laws. Boesky, the flamboyant stock speculator whose cooperation with the government cracked open one of the largest insider trading scandals on Wall Street, has died at the age of 87.
Working undercover, Boesky secretly taped three conversations with Michael Milken, the so-called “junk bond king” whose work with Drexel Burnham Lambert had revolutionized the credit markets. Milken eventually pleaded guilty to six felonies and served 22 months in prison, while Boesky paid a $100 million fine and spent 20 months in a minimum-security California prison nicknamed “Club Fed,” beginning in March 1988.
Boesky, however, said he couldn’t remember saying “greed is healthy” and denied another quotation attributed to him in the 1984 Atlantic Monthly, in which he allegedly said that climbing to the height of a huge pile of silver dollars would be “an aphrodisiac experience.” Dennis Levine of Drexel and Martin Siegal of Kidder, Peabody fed Boesky confidential information in return for promised cut of profits of either 1% or 5%.
In the 1980s those “junk” bonds were used to finance thousands of leveraged buyouts, including Revlon, Beatrice Companies, RJR Nabisco Inc. and Federated Department Stores, making Milken a hated and feared figure on Wall Street. When John Mulheren Jr. feared he was about to be implicated, the Wall Street executive loaded an assault rifle with the intent of killing Boesky and Boesky’s former head trader, police said. Mulheren was captured en route.
The reversals bolstered the arguments of free-traders who argued that Wall Street had been victimized by a publicity-seeking federal prosecutor using racketeering statutes usually reserved to combat organized crime. The government had previously done little to police insider trading, and some said it should be legalized.
Three years after his release from a Brooklyn halfway house in April 1990, Boesky and his wife Seema divorced after 30 years of marriage.
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