Milken, Wizard of ‘Junk Bonds,’ Breaks His Silence
Michael Milken is talking.
Milken--who all but created the “junk bond” business for the investment firm of Drexel Burnham Lambert and whose ties to stock speculator Ivan F. Boesky have been a topic of Wall Street speculation ever since Boesky’s $100-million settlement of insider trading charges last November--has long been the silent wonder of investment bankers.
He rarely gives press interviews--none publicly since Boesky’s role at the hub of a major illegal trading ring was revealed--and is known to have little use for journalists, whom he assails for wildly misunderstanding the nature of the junk bond market and his role in it.
But Milken has been giving a series of interviews, sources have told The Times, to writer Edward Jay Epstein. Epstein, the author of several books, including one on Lee Harvey Oswald’s connections with the Soviet KGB and another on the diamond market, has told associates that Milken talked with him extensively and gave him carte blanche to use the interviews in whatever form he wishes.
Epstein could not be reached for comment on the nature of the interviews or his plans for them.
His views on the current Securities and Exchange Commission and Justice Department investigations of corporate finance activities on Wall Street are on record, however, and they are believed to reflect Milken’s.
In the May issue of Manhattan, inc., a glossy monthly of New York business features, Epstein writes that any charges the government might bring against Drexel are likely to be no more than overblown “technical infractions,” and that the probe is corporate America’s vengeance for Drexel’s aggressive backing of takeover entrepreneurs: “The Wall Street equivalent of getting Al Capone for breaking the tax stamp on a pack of cigarettes.
“Milken’s crime, if it can be called a crime,” writes Epstein, “was finding a way to breathe new financial life into an economy stifled by the weight of a tumorous corpocracy. This was intolerable to corporate America.”
