Den of Thieves
The Untold Story of the Men Who Plundered Wall Street and the Chase That Brought Them Down
James B. Stewart · 1991 · Business
12 min · 12 chaptersNarrated in your voice
What it's about
James B. Stewart reconstructs the insider trading scandals that convulsed Wall Street in the 1980s, tracing how a mid-level banker's private tip network grew into a web connecting Ivan Boesky, Martin Siegel, and ultimately Michael Milken, the architect of Drexel Burnham Lambert's junk bond empire. Drawing on grand jury testimony, court records, and interviews, Stewart argues the scandal exposed a Wall Street culture where information was currency and rules were negotiable, reshaping how regulators pursue white-collar crime.
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Who it's for
- Readers curious how insider trading rings actually operate, step by step - Finance professionals who want the real history behind junk bonds, hostile takeovers, and the SEC's biggest 1980s cases - Anyone drawn to true-crime narratives where the crime happens in boardrooms instead of back alleys
What’s inside
- 1The Photocopier and the Bahamas1 min
Dennis Levine's insider trading network shows that the 1980s scandal began not with a criminal mastermind but with a mid-level banker exploiting ordinary office access and offshore banking secrecy to build a private information market.
- 2The Arbitrageur's Edge1 min
Ivan Boesky's arbitrage business, built on legitimate speculation about takeover targets, became a laundering channel for illegal tips because the line between skilled analysis and paid-for information was too easily blurred to police from outside.
- 3The Junk Bond Machine1 min
Michael Milken's high-yield bond operation at Drexel Burnham Lambert proved that access to capital, not board approval or corporate merit, could determine who was able to acquire a company, and that shift rewired the American takeover economy.
- 4The Double Life of Martin Siegel1 min
Martin Siegel's secret arrangement to sell Boesky deal information for cash payments delivered in parks and phone booths shows how completely the formal barrier between deal teams and traders failed once real money was on the table.
- 5The Trail Through the Bahamas1 min
The scandal's unraveling began with slow, mechanical pattern detection rather than a dramatic tip, showing that even sophisticated criminal networks remain vulnerable to routine regulatory surveillance if it is sustained long enough.
- 6Boesky Wears a Wire1 min
Boesky's decision to cooperate secretly with prosecutors, wearing a recording device in conversations with former partners, shows how the government's leverage over one defendant can be used to build cases against people far more insulated from direct evidence.
- 7The Squeeze on Drexel1 min
Rudy Giuliani's willingness to threaten Drexel Burnham Lambert with a RICO indictment, which could have frozen the firm's assets before any trial, forced a guilty plea that substituted prosecutorial leverage for a courtroom verdict on the underlying charges.
- 8Milken's Plea and Drexel's Collapse1 min
Michael Milken's eventual guilty plea to six felony counts, most unrelated to the core junk bond financing practices originally scrutinized, reflects a settlement driven by exhaustion, financial risk, and family pressure rather than a clean legal judgment on his central business.
- 9A Culture That Rewarded Proximity to Information1 min
The scandal is best understood not as the work of a few rogue individuals but as the predictable product of a Wall Street culture that treated inside information as a professional asset and regulatory limits as negotiable business risks.
About James B. Stewart
James B. Stewart is a journalist who won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism for his Wall Street Journal coverage of the 1987 crash and insider trading scandals. A former page-one editor at the Journal and later a staff writer at The New Yorker, he has written several other narrative nonfiction books on business and legal scandals, including Blind Eye and DisneyWar.
