"I think greed is good, you can be greedy and still feel good about yourself." -Ivan Boesky, in a speech at the University of California, Berkeley in 1986
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Ivan Boesky (1937) is probably America's most famous arbitrageur-- an investor who uses inside information to make simultaneous bets against investments, or risk-free profiteering on the open market.

Ivan Boesky amassed a fortune of over $200 million in the early-mid 1980s by betting on corporate takeovers. At the time, there were already laws prohibiting this type of profiteering, which was rampant on Wall Street, but the prosecution of Boesky marked a new era-- the enforcement of these laws. 

Boesky cooperated with the SEC, and became an informant. He was sentenced to three and a half years in federal prison and fined $100 million.
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1985- Before Prison

Early 90s- After Prison

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"For four years Ivan Boesky has been Wall Street's unseen villain. Under wraps, then behind bars, the former takeover speculator implicated some of the biggest names in the financial markets by giving secret testimony before federal grand juries. Boesky's singing led to guilty pleas of securities violations by, among others, Drexel Burnham Lambert and junk-bond king Michael Milken. Finally last week Boesky, 53, materialized, testifying in public for the first time since he copped a plea to insider-trading schemes.

Looking almost as if he had never gone to jail in disgrace, Boesky wore a dark "power" suit. Gone were the flowing beard and long hair he grew I while serving much of a three-year prison term. His manner--abrupt amd testy--was vintage Boesky.

His testimony came at the securities-fraud trial of a once close friend, John A. Mulheren Jr., a stock trader. Reprising his own illegalities, Boesky told how he had aides stuff $800,000 in a briefcase as a payoff to convicted tipster Martin Siegel. Under a caustic cross-examination, Boesky disclosed for the first time that he deducted from his income taxes half of the $100 million he paid to settle insider-trading charges. As for his time in prison, Boesky's habits seemed familiar. He acknowledged that he paid "a couple of chaps" a "few quarters" to do his laundry--against prison rules."

-Newsweek Magazine, June 4, 1990
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