Ivan Boesky

Convicted Wall Street swindler Ivan Boesky took the witness stand yesterday at his divorce trial to describe his once lavish lifestyle - and to cry poverty. Asking for half his ex-wife's $100 million fortune, Boesky, 56, testified about his halcyon days as the king of Wall Street arbitrage. "I guess it was rather elaborate, as I look back," he said in a wistful moment in Manhattan Supreme Court. "There was a very substantial amount of materiality available - travel, clothes, transportation, dwellings.

Convicted stock swindler Ivan Boesky checked into a men's corrections facility in Brooklyn this week to serve out the remainder of a three-year sentence for his role in the biggest insider trading scandal to rock Wall Street. "He's here," Napoleon Johnson, program administrator for the Brooklyn Community Corrections Center, said Wednesday night. "He arrived at 8 a.m. this morning . . . alone. " One inmate at the 80-man federal facilty said the fallen arbitraguer "looks good, he's had a haircut.

In the months leading up to his sentencing, Michael Milken received bundles of hate mail. People blamed the former Drexel Burnham Lambert financier for the recent spate of business failures and for the collapse of the savings and loan industry. "There have been so many types of torture proposed for him . . . you would not believe it," complained Arthur Liman, Milken's attorney, to U.S. District Judge Kimba M. Wood. As it turned out, Milken will not be drawn and quartered. He will not be hung by his toes.

The Securities and Exchange Commission said yesterday it supports legislation to define insider trading and would recommend language for such a definition within six weeks. Acting SEC chairman Charles Cox told the Senate Banking Committee a bill proposed this week to define insider trading as "the wrongful use of material nonpublic information" was good but contained some ambiguous provisions that might reduce the commission's flexibility in prosecuting cases. The SEC believes its enforcement program is successful even without a legal definition but is willing to propose one because it believes there is a public perception that "the paramaters (of insider trading)

Butcher & Singer yesterday became the latest brokerage house to run afoul of the Securities & Exchange Commission's crackdown on insider trading. The SEC suspended the brokerage for 30 days from engaging in certain over- the-counter stock trading activities, starting Feb. 2. The penalty is for an alleged stock forgery and insider trading scheme that took place at the Philadelphia firm 10 years ago. "For awhile, with Boesky and Levine and et cetera, we thought they had bigger fish to fry down there," said Butcher & Singer spokeswoman Rebecca Brown.

When Wall Street loses its honor, it is more than a loss of face. It is a shattering blow to the whole structure of trust and faith on which America's economic strength depends. Though spectacularly dramatized by the Ivan Boesky scandal, the financial community's troubles go beyond one trader's ingenuity in carrying rapacious avarice to new heights. A climate has been created on Wall Street that breeds whole colonies of aspiring Boeskys. Unless the leaders of the financial community move swiftly and firmly to put their own house in order, one of two things will surely happen.

DREXEL SUES IVAN BOESKY In a bizarre twist to the insider- trading saga of the 1980s, Drexel Burnham Lambert, which was destroyed by the scandal, yesterday sued former client Ivan Boesky for stealing millions of dollars of Drexel's profits. Boesky, once one of Wall Street's most powerful stock speculators, was the key player in the insider-trading scandal, and his cooperation with authorities led to criminal charges against Drexel, its former junk-bond chief, Michael Milken, and other prominent financial figures.

News that Ivan Boesky agreed to return $50 million to parties injured in his insider trading scheme is sending investors scrambling for ways to get a bite of the Wall Street takeover artist's profits. A suit was filed in Manhattan federal court yesterday by a Pennsville, N.J., man on behalf of investors who allege they suffered losses on stock they purchased between February 1985 and May 1986, when the insider trading scheme was in operation. Two of the three law firms representing the Pennsville man are in Philadelphia.

Former high-flying stock speculator John Mulheren Jr. was found guilty yesterday of four counts of securities fraud and conspiracy for helping Ivan Boesky manipulate stock prices in exchange for inside information. The jury remained deadlocked on 26 other charges. U.S. District Judge Miriam Cedarbaum accepted the partial verdict and sent the jury back to deliberate on the other charges. The trial involves Boesky's first public testimony against anyone he has implicated in the government's long investigation of insider trading.

The morning headlines on Thanksgiving must have read like a blessing to most people: Michael Milken, the boyish wonder of the junk-bond biz, had been sentenced to 10 years in prison for his illegal manipulations. The judge threw the book at him for several reasons: He committed crimes, he didn't cooperate with the federal probe of Wall Street, and his doing hard time might scare other people into staying within the law. Truth to tell, we initially set out to write an editorial defending, even celebrating, the prison sentence.

QUOTE "If you really want to hurt your parents and you don't have nerve enough to be homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. " - Kurt Vonnegut, lecturing on writing at Stanford University BOESKY CUTS DEAL WITH EX-WIFE Why, oh why, Seema? Why did you settle? You had the man where you wanted him, at your mercy. Ivan Boesky had moaned and groaned that paying the fines from his conviction for insider trading left him penniless, and he was suing his ex- wife, Seema Boesky, who was independently wealthy after selling the family- owned Beverly Hills Hotel.

Convicted Wall Street swindler Ivan Boesky took the witness stand yesterday at his divorce trial to describe his once lavish lifestyle - and to cry poverty. Asking for half his ex-wife's $100 million fortune, Boesky, 56, testified about his halcyon days as the king of Wall Street arbitrage. "I guess it was rather elaborate, as I look back," he said in a wistful moment in Manhattan Supreme Court. "There was a very substantial amount of materiality available - travel, clothes, transportation, dwellings.

DREXEL SUES IVAN BOESKY In a bizarre twist to the insider- trading saga of the 1980s, Drexel Burnham Lambert, which was destroyed by the scandal, yesterday sued former client Ivan Boesky for stealing millions of dollars of Drexel's profits. Boesky, once one of Wall Street's most powerful stock speculators, was the key player in the insider-trading scandal, and his cooperation with authorities led to criminal charges against Drexel, its former junk-bond chief, Michael Milken, and other prominent financial figures.

Nelson and Winnie Mandela have refused comment on a report that they're separating after 34 years of marriage. London's Sunday Times said the union was imperiled after he found out that his wife allegedly threatened a woman who, with Winnie, was found guilty last year of kidnapping and assaulting four youths in 1989. Xoliswa Falati told the Times that Winnie Mandela became enraged when Falati said she was entitled to a piece of the $350,000 raised to finance Winnie's pending appeal of a six-year prison term.

The morning headlines on Thanksgiving must have read like a blessing to most people: Michael Milken, the boyish wonder of the junk-bond biz, had been sentenced to 10 years in prison for his illegal manipulations. The judge threw the book at him for several reasons: He committed crimes, he didn't cooperate with the federal probe of Wall Street, and his doing hard time might scare other people into staying within the law. Truth to tell, we initially set out to write an editorial defending, even celebrating, the prison sentence.

In the months leading up to his sentencing, Michael Milken received bundles of hate mail. People blamed the former Drexel Burnham Lambert financier for the recent spate of business failures and for the collapse of the savings and loan industry. "There have been so many types of torture proposed for him . . . you would not believe it," complained Arthur Liman, Milken's attorney, to U.S. District Judge Kimba M. Wood. As it turned out, Milken will not be drawn and quartered. He will not be hung by his toes.

Former high-flying stock speculator John Mulheren Jr. was found guilty yesterday of four counts of securities fraud and conspiracy for helping Ivan Boesky manipulate stock prices in exchange for inside information. The jury remained deadlocked on 26 other charges. U.S. District Judge Miriam Cedarbaum accepted the partial verdict and sent the jury back to deliberate on the other charges. The trial involves Boesky's first public testimony against anyone he has implicated in the government's long investigation of insider trading.

Lee Iacocca, seven years after helping launch a Statue of Liberty restoration campaign, has asked its fund-raising arm to turn off the money machine. "We hit $333 million and I said, 'A third of a billion is enough,' because no matter what you come up with, they spend it," the Chrysler head said in Sunday's Star-Ledger of Newark. "I don't know if they spend it well, but they spend it. " Iacocca, who is now chairman emeritus of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation of New York but was its major enchilada its first three years, addressed the situation two weeks after the nonprofit group announced plans to raise $6 million more to beautify the former Ellis Island immigration station.

Naturally, it was my friend Wayne Marshall who spotted the small item in the New York Times reporting that the president of Exxon's shipping subsidiary, Frank Iarossi, has resigned to become chairman of a standards- setting organization for the shipping trade. Wayne sent over the clip under the heading "Ironies Beyond the Capacity of Any Writer to Invent. " Wayne goes in for that sort of thing. He also collects ugly postcards. Don't send him one of those jackalope postcards that people are always sending from Wyoming or someplace.