Ivan Boesky, Wall Street financier who coined ‘greed is good’, dies aged 87

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

Boesky, who partly inspired the Gordon Gekko character in the 1987 movie Wall Street, was considered a genius at risk arbitrage – the business of speculating in takeover stocks – and his wealth was estimated at $280m.

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

Just 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 became a legend by committing vast sums to potential merger deals, trying to take advantage of the small but predictable gains that follow takeover rumors.

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

All along, Boesky insisted he bought stocks only after formal takeover bids were announced. But the Securities and Exchange Commission proved he obtained tips from investment bankers about deals in the works and used them illegally before they were released to the public.

He won leniency by cooperating in the government’s investigation of insider trading rings and reportedly taped conversations with his business contacts.

“He has been reviled as a stool pigeon. He has become a leper in the financial community,” Leon Silverman, Boesky’s lawyer, said at 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 $100m fine and a lifetime ban from trading securities.

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

With a degree from the Detroit College of Law, he worked as a law clerk to a US district court judge before joining the accounting firm Touche Ross.

Boesky moved to Wall Street in 1966, joining L F Rothschild as a securities analyst. In 1975, with $700,000 bankrolled by his wife’s family, he established his own firm specializing in risk arbitrage.

By 1981, the Ivan F Boesky Corp had assets of more than $500m. Boesky reputedly made more than $150m in profits from runs on CBS, Gulf Oil and Conoco.

Described as a “money-orientated monomaniac”, Boesky himself said his work was “a sickness I have in the face of which I am helpless”.

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

Whether at parties or under the dentist’s drill, the tall and impeccably tailored Boesky talked only business.

In his vast, white-marble suite of offices on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, he punched buttons on a 300-line telephone console and studied stock market figures on an array of video screens.

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

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

After he left prison in 1990, Boesky kept a low profile. He was reported to have enrolled in rabbinical studies and became involved in projects helping the homeless.

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

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