Ivan Boesky

Ivan Frederick Boesky (March 6, 1937 – May 20, 2024) was an American stock trader known for his prominent role in an insider trading scandal in the mid-1980s. He pleaded guilty, was fined a record $100 million, served three years in prison and became an informant.

Boesky was born to a Jewish family in Detroit, Michigan. His family owned several delicatessens and taverns in the city. He attended the Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills before graduating from Detroit's Mumford High School. He then attended courses at Wayne State University, Eastern Michigan University and the University of Michigan. Despite lacking an undergraduate degree, he was admitted to Detroit College of Law (now Michigan State University College of Law) and graduated in 1965. In the 1980s, he served as an adjunct professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business and at New York University's Graduate School of Business.

In 1966, Boesky and his wife relocated to New York where he worked for several stock brokerage companies, including L.F. Rothschild and Edwards & Hanly. In 1975, he initiated his own stock brokerage company, Ivan F. Boesky & Company, with $700,000 (equivalent to $4 million in 2023) worth of start-up money from his wife's family with a business plan that speculated on corporate takeovers. The company grew from profits as well as buy-in investments from new partnerships. By 1986, he had become an arbitrageur who had amassed a fortune of more than US$200 million by betting on corporate takeovers and the $136 million in proceeds from the sale of The Beverly Hills Hotel. He made the cover of Time magazine for December 1, 1986.

In 1986, Boesky entered into a plea agreement with the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, agreeing to plead guilty to one count of Conspiracy to Commit Violations of the Federal Securities Laws. He used inside information provided by Robert Wilkis and Ira Sokolow, two investment bankers, and purchased securities for entities with which he was affiliated. The inside information typically involved tender offers, mergers or other possible business combinations, for companies such as Nabisco Brands, Inc., R.J. Reynolds, and Houston Natural Gas Corp.

Although insider trading of this kind was illegal, laws prohibiting it were rarely enforced until Boesky was prosecuted. He cooperated with the SEC and informed on others, including the case against financier Michael Milken and, per a plea bargain, received a prison sentence of 3+1⁄2 years and was fined US$100 million. Although he was released after two years, he was permanently prohibited from working with securities. He served his sentence at Lompoc Federal Prison Camp near Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

Boesky, unable to rehabilitate his reputation after being released from prison, paid hundreds of millions of dollars as fines and compensation for his Guinness share-trading fraud role and a number of separate insider-dealing scams. Later, he began practicing Judaism, attended classes at and donating money to the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. In 1987, after the financial scandal fallout, he asked his name be removed from the Jewish Theological Seminary Library.

In 1962, Boesky married Seema Silberstein, the daughter of a Detroit real estate magnate whose holdings included The Beverly Hills Hotel in California. After her father's death, they won a court battle against her sister and brother-in-law over the hotel's ownership.

In 1991, Silberstein divorced Boesky and agreed to pay him $23 million and $180,000 a year for life. They had four children.

Boesky and his second wife, Ana, had another child. They lived in La Jolla, California, until his death on May 20, 2024.

The character of Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street (1987) is based in part on Boesky, particularly his "greed is good" speech which resembled the commencement speech Boesky delivered in May 1986 at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley: "I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself."

Boesky was featured in a CNBC documentary entitled Empires of New York.

Films

• In the film Ocean's Eleven (2001), Brad Pitt's character, Rusty Ryan, mentions a type of confidence scam termed "a Boesky" that involves a wealthy bankroller with insider information.
• The character of Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street (1987) is based at least in part on Boesky, especially regarding a famous speech he delivered on the positive aspects of greed at the University of California, Berkeley School of Business commencement ceremony in May 1986, where he said in part "I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself".

Literature

• In the novel American Psycho (1991), Craig McDermott wins a Halloween costume party dressed as Ivan Boesky.
• Famous hacker Kevin Mitnick recollects his encounters with Boesky in prison, in his book Ghost in the Wires.
• In Gump & Co. (1995), the sequel to Winston Groom's novel Forrest Gump (1986), the protagonist Forrest Gump was hired by "Ivan Bozosky". Gump also later begins to wonder how he can command such a high salary for only having to sign papers.
• A 1989 issue of MAD had a spoof of baseball cards featuring celebrities, one being Boesky wearing an old-style black & white prisoner's uniform and using his ball from the "ball and chain" akin to pitching a baseball with the caption "Bats left, steals left and right". Interestingly, the issue debuted shortly before Boesky's release.

Stage productions

• In the musical The Wedding Singer (based on the 1998 Adam Sandler/Drew Barrymore movie), the character Glen Guglia mentions that "Boesky bought half, and if Ivan's buying, you know it's in the money."

Television

• In season 2 episode 18 of Gilmore Girls a member of Rory and Paris' business team shows up to the group's first business meeting at Rory's grandfather's house and exclaims (looking at the meeting setup) "I feel like Ivan Boesky".
• In an episode of Animaniacs entitled "Plane Pals" (1993), Yakko, Wakko, and Dot harass a tightly-wound Wall Street accountant named Ivan Blowsky, when he is forced to sit next to them on an airplane.
• In the episode of Futurama, "Future Stock" (2002), an 80s Wall Street character, reminiscent of Gordon Gekko, said of his glory days: "I was having whisky with Boesky and cookies with Milken."
• In Season 2, Episode 3 of Psych ("Psy vs. Psy"), the Federal Treasury agent claims to have arrested Ivan Boesky himself.
• In Robocop The Series, episode 20 Corporate Raiders, the Chairman of OCP mentions he attended the "Ivan Boesky Elementary Business School".
• The character Charlotte, a high-stakes CEO, on Rugrats has two fish in her office named "Boesky" and "Vesco".
• Boesky is mentioned in the episode "Last Days" of the television series Sliders: after an asteroid fails to destroy the Earth of the dimension they are in, Rembrandt Brown sees an article in a newspaper stating that Boesky had bought half of the houses in Beverly Hills for 10,000 dollars apiece and that the erstwhile owners want their houses back.
• In The Shield, Vic Mackey states that there will be a "money laundering operation which would make Ivan Boesky flinch".