Ivan Boesky, Wall Street financier who coined ‘greed is a good thing,’ dies at 87 | Stock Markets

Ivan Boesky, the financier who gave birth to the “greed is good” mantra before going to prison in one of Wall Street’s biggest insider trading scandals of the 1980s, has died at age 87, the New York Times reported Monday.

Boesky, who partly inspired the character Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film Wall Street, was considered a genius in venture arbitrage – the business of speculating on public stocks – and his wealth was estimated at $280 million. of dollars.

“I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself,” he said in a commencement speech at the University of California, Berkeley’s business school in 1986.

A few months later, the man known on Wall Street as “Ivan the Terrible” was indicted on charges that would send him to disgrace, near bankruptcy and prison.

Boesky has become a legend for committing huge sums to potential merger deals, trying to profit from the small but predictable gains that follow takeover rumors.

Often, news that Boesky was investing in a company was enough to entice other speculators to enter the market, creating a self-fulfilling rise in the stock price.

Boesky always insisted that he only bought shares after tender offers were officially announced. But the Securities and Exchange Commission proved that he obtained advice from investment bankers about pending trades and used it illegally before it was made public.

He won leniency by cooperating with the government’s investigation into insider trading rings and allegedly recorded conversations with his business contacts.

“He was called a stool pigeon. He has become a leper in the financial community,” Leon Silverman, Boesky’s attorney, said during his client’s sentencing hearing.

Boesky testified against Michael Milken, the junk bond king whose stunning rise and fall also epitomized the era. Boesky received a relatively light sentence of three and a half years in prison, a $100 million fine and a lifetime ban from securities trading.

Ivan Frederick Boesky was born March 6, 1937 and grew up in Detroit, where his parents owned restaurants. He later said that at age 13, he bought a truck and drove it without a license in city parks, where he sold ice cream.

A graduate of the Detroit College of Law, he worked as a law clerk for a U.S. district court judge before joining the accounting firm Touche Ross.

Boesky joined Wall Street in 1966, joining LF Rothschild as a securities analyst. In 1975, with $700,000 financed by his wife’s family, he created his own company specializing in risk arbitrage.

In 1981, Ivan F Boesky Corp had assets of over $500 million. Boesky reportedly made more than $150 million in profits from operations in CBS, Gulf Oil and Conoco.

Described as a “money-oriented monomaniac”, Boesky himself said his work was “a disease of mine over which I am helpless”.

“The machine doesn’t like to stop,” he says of his 20-hour workdays. “I don’t know how not to work. I don’t know how to rest.

Whether at parties or under the dentist’s drill, Boesky, tall and impeccably built, was all business.

In his vast white marble offices on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, he pressed buttons on a 300-line telephone console and studied stock market figures on a series of video screens.

In 1985, he established himself as the dean of the arbitration industry by writing a book called Merger Mania. But a year later, when he pleaded guilty to insider trading, his reputation collapsed and Merger Mania was dropped by the publisher.

He served about two years at the Lompoc, Calif., “country club” prison, with tennis courts, a golf course, a gym and a billiard room. But rather than making millions, he earned $3 a day for jobs like carpentry.

After his release from prison in 1990, Boesky kept a low profile. He reportedly enrolled in rabbinical studies and became involved in projects helping the homeless.

He lived in a luxury home overlooking the Pacific Ocean in La Jolla, California, which he had obtained in a divorce from his ex-wife Seema, the daughter of a real estate mogul.

The death was confirmed to the New York Times by Boesky’s daughter, Marianne Boesky. She did not immediately respond to messages.