Bad Boys, Bad Boys

On the long walk down to Boesky’s conference room, I passed vacant office after vacant office and halls lined with packing cartons. Boesky, almost always tanned and relaxed, seemed edgy and gaunt that day. You could tell he didn’t want to chitchat. In fact, he seemed eager to get rid of me. Curtly, he asked what he could do for me. I told him I wanted to borrow some of his spare office space. No, he said, there was no room for his people as it was. I told him that I just needed a little space and that it looked like he had a lot of it. No, he said, he didn’t, he had no spare room at all. He kept swinging his head from side to side, distracted, almost goofy in his lack of attention. I looked at him like he was nuts. But you didn’t push a kingpin like Boesky. Suddenly, he got up and said he had to run off and he left me to find my way out.

Weird, I said to myself as I walked back to my studio apartment on East 72nd Street. What the heck was that about? What’s eating Boesky? And then, at home, I put on the TV to watch the Nightly Business Report on PBS and saw a picture of Ivan Boesky flashing along with the news that shortly after the close of the market, the Feds had busted him for insider trading. He was cooperating with the government—in fact, he had been undercover for the Feds for the past few months, building cases against others with whom he had trafficked in inside information. The Feds had been watching and listening in the next room during our meeting that day.

With Boesky’s arrest, an era ended. The government, which seemed to look the other way as people made big bets with inside information, had decided to put an end to the practice. In another year’s time, after a series of high-profile perp walks and indictments, no one would dream of trading on inside information. The arrests changed the game; if you found out news before you should have, you closed your eyes to it. Too dangerous; you’d get caught just like Boesky, or Marty Siegel, the most important investment banker of that time, or, alas, Michael Milken, the most powerful financier of the era