Ivan Boesky

Early life and education

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 during 1965. During 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.

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

Career

During 1966, Boesky and his wife relocated to New York where he worked for several stock brokerage companies. During 1975, he initiated his own stock brokerage company, Ivan F. Boesky & Company, with $700,000 (equivalent to $3.1 million 2016) worth of start money from his wife’s family with a business plan of speculating on corporate takeovers. Boesky's company grew from profits as well as buy-in investments from new partnerships. By 1986, Boesky 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. Boesky was on the cover of Time magazine December 1, 1986.

During 1987, a group of partners sued Boesky over what they claimed were misleading partnership documents. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigated him for making investments based on information received from corporate officers. These stock acquisitions were sometimes brazen, with massive purchases occurring only a few days before a corporation announced a takeover.

Although insider trading of this kind was illegal, laws prohibiting it were rarely enforced until Boesky was prosecuted. Boesky cooperated with the SEC and informed on others, including the case against financier Michael Milken. As a result of a plea bargain, Boesky 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 never recovered his reputation after doing his prison time, and 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, Boesky, who is Jewish, began actively practicing his Judaism and even attended classes at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America where he had been a major donor; however, during 1987, after the fallout from his financial scandal, The New York Times reported that "after Ivan F. Boesky had been fined $100 million in the insider-trading scandal, the Jewish Theological Seminary, acting at his request, took his name off its $20 million library."

His involvement in criminal activities is recounted by the book Den of Thieves by James B. Stewart.

Another version of these events is recounted by Jonathan Guinness in his book Requiem for a Family Business which suggests the SEC granted him immunity from prosecution and allowed him to continue to insider trade for significant profit whilst wire tapping him to gain evidence against others.

In a 2012 interview with the New York Times, a cousin of Boesky's disclosed that he is living in La Jolla, California.

Personal life

During 1991, he divorced his wife and she agreed to pay him $23 million and $180,000 a year for life. They have four children.

Cinema

Literature

Television