Ivan Boesky leaves federal court in New York in 1987 after pleading guilty to one count of violating federal securities laws. Boesky, the flamboyant stock speculator whose co-operation with the Government exposed one of Wall Street's largest insider trading scandals, has died at the age of 87. Photo / AP
Ivan Boesky leaves federal court in New York in 1987 after pleading guilty to one count of violating federal securities laws. Boesky, the flamboyant stock speculator whose co-operation with the Government exposed one of Wall Street's largest insider trading scandals, has died at the age of 87. Photo / AP
Ivan Boesky, the flamboyant stock trader whose co-operation with the US Government cracked open one of the largest insider trading scandals in the history of Wall Street, has died at the age of 87.
A representative at the Marianne Boesky Gallery, owned by Ivan Boesky’s daughter, confirmed his death.
No other details were given.
The son of a Detroit delicatessen owner, Boesky was once considered one of the richest and most influential risk-takers on Wall Street.
He had parlayed US$700,000 from his late mother-in-law’s estate into a fortune estimated at more than US$200 million (over NZ$1 billion in today’s figures), hurtling him into the ranks of Forbes magazine’s list of the 400 richest Americans.
Once implicated in insider trading, Boesky co-operated with a brash young US attorney named Rudolph Giuliani in a bid for leniency, uncovering a scandal that shattered promising careers, blemished some of the most respected US investment brokerages and injected a certain paranoia into the securities industry.
Working undercover, Boesky secretly taped three conversations with Michael Milken, the so-called “junk bond king” whose work with Drexel Burnham Lambert had revolutionised the credit markets.
Milken eventually pleaded guilty to six felonies and served 22 months in prison, while Boesky paid a US$100m fine and spent 20 months in a minimum-security California prison nicknamed “Club Fed”, beginning in March 1988.
After Boesky’s arrest, accounts circulated widely that he had told business students during a commencement address at the University of California at Berkeley in 1985 or 1986, “Greed is all right, by the way. I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.”
The line was memorably echoed by Michael Douglas in his Oscar-winning portrayal of Gordon Gekko, a high-flying trader, in Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street.
“The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good,” Douglas tells the shareholders of Teldar Paper.
“Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.”
Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film Wall Street.
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 climbing to the height of a huge pile of silver dollars would be “an aphrodisiac experience”.
While he usually worked 18-hour days, the silver-haired and lean Boesky also lived a life of opulence.
He wore designer clothes, travelled in limousines, private airplanes and helicopters and revamped his 930sq m Westchester County mansion with a Jeffersonian dome to resemble Monticello.
“There was a very substantial amount of materiality available,” Boesky said during his 1993 divorce proceedings.
“We had places in Palm Beach, Paris, New York, the south of France.”
Boesky was an arbitrageur, a risk-taker who made millions by betting on stocks thought to be the target of corporate takeovers.
But some of his tips came from within the mergers and acquisitions departments of Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc and Kidder, Peabody & Co.
Dennis Levine of Drexel and Martin Siegal of Kidder, Peabody & Co fed Boesky confidential information in return for promised cuts of profits of either 1 per cent or 5 per cent.
Boesky paid Siegal US$700,000 in three instalments, with a courier delivering briefcases full of cash at three clandestine meetings on a street corner and in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.
Boesky had made millions on Siegal’s tips, which included word that Getty Oil and Carnation Co were ripe for takeovers.
Levine was arrested before his payout could come, tripped up by his own insider trading.
Facing harsh penalties under the Government’s racketeering statutes, Levine revealed everything and Boesky began talking as well, providing information leading to convictions or guilty pleas in cases involving former stockbroker Boyd Jefferies, Siegel, four executives of Britian’s Guiness PLC, takeover strategist Paul Bilzerian, stock speculator Salim Lewis and others.
The most notable arrest was of Milken, the pioneering financier who had transformed capital markets in the 1970s with a new form of bond that allowed thousands of mid-sized companies to raise money.
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.
The financier and philanthropist was indicted on 98 counts, including securities and mail fraud, insider trading, racketeering and making false statements.
Prosecutors said Milken and Boesky conspired together to manipulate securities prices, rig transactions and evade taxes and regulatory requirements.
Milken eventually pleaded guilty to six securities violations, including telling Boesky he’d cover any losses he suffered trading the stock of Fischbach Corp, a takeover target at the time.
Prosecutors said Boesky’s co-operation provided the Government with the most information about securities law violations since the legislative hearings that led to the 1933 and 1934 Securities Acts.
When John Mulheren jnr 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.
At trial, Mulheren’s attorney, Thomas Puccio, called Boesky a repeat liar and “pile of human garbage” who was motivated to say anything to assist federal authorities in exchange for leniency.
“If there ever was a person to whom the title Prince of Darkness could be applied, Ivan Boesky is that man,” Puccio said.
“The king of greed, a person who stood for nothing except his own ambition, his own greed.”
The jury convicted Mulheren, but his conviction was later overturned.
Other convictions were reversed as well – those of GAF Corp and a senior executive, five principals of Princeton-Newport Partners and that of a former Drexel trader.
The reversals bolstered the arguments of free-traders who argued that Wall Street had been victimised by a publicity-seeking federal prosecutor using racketeering statutes usually reserved to combat organised crime.
Ivan Boesky, pictured here in 1989, the flamboyant stock speculator whose co-operation with the Government cracked open one of the largest insider trading scandals on Wall Street, has died at the age of 87. Photo / AP
The Government had previously done little to police insider trading, and some said it should be legalised.
But no one could defend payoffs involving suitcases full of cash.
Levine, writing in the pages of Fortune after his release, said he couldn’t understand why Boesky would risk so much by engaging in something so clearly illegal.
“And I don’t know why Ivan engaged in illegal activities when he had a fortune estimated at over $200 million,” Levine wrote in 1990. “I’m sure he derived much of his wealth from legitimate enterprise: He was skilled at arbitrage and obsessed with his work.
“He must have been driven by something beyond rational behaviour.”
At his 1987 sentencing, Boesky’s lawyer quoted his psychiatrist as saying Boesky “has begun to recognise that he suffered from an abnormal and compulsive need to prove himself, to overcome some sense of inadequacy or inferiority that is rooted in his childhood”.
Three years after his release from a Brooklyn halfway house in April 1990, Boesky and his wife Seema divorced after 30 years of marriage.
Claiming he had been left penniless after paying fines, restitution and legal fees, he won US$20m in cash and $180,000 a year in alimony from his wife’s US$100m fortune.
He also got a US$2.5m home in the La Jolla section of San Diego, where he lived with his boyhood friend, Houshang Wekili.
Ivan Frederick Boesky was born in Detroit in 1937 into a family of Russian Jewish immigrants.
Boesky said he learned industriousness from his father, who operated three delicatessens.
At the age of 13 Boesky bought a 1937 Chevy truck, painted it white and sold icecream from it in Detroit parks, making about US$150 a week in nickels and dimes.
A three-time college dropout, Boesky entered the Detroit College of Law in 1959, which then did not require an undergraduate degree for admission.
He withdrew twice before receiving his degree five years later.
While in law school Boesky married Seema Silberstein, the daughter of Ben Silberstein, a real estate developer and the owner of the Beverly Hills Hotel.
Unable to find employment with any major Detroit law firm, Boesky moved in 1966 with his wife and the first of their four children to New York, where he floated from job to job on Wall Street.
In 1975 Boesky struck out on his own, opening a small brokerage that he eventually parlayed into a sprawling group of investment companies with more than 100 employees.
He worked gruelling hours, gave self-promoting newspaper interviews and wrote a 1985 book entitled Merger Mania.
He was also an active philanthropist, especially with Jewish causes, giving US$20m to endow a library at the Jewish Theological Seminary that was later renamed.
