Benjamin J. Stein's coverage of Michael Milken and Drexel was the first to reveal the extent of the junk bond problem. By the time this book was published, Milken was nearly out of jail his expensive lawyers had already convinced the judge to lessen his sentence from ten years to two years. Stein began noticing Milken and Drexel in the mid-1980s, received a death threat from a Drexel hotshot in 1988, and was trashed a few years later in a book by Jesse Kornbluth a biography arranged by Milken's publicist Ken Lerer that claimed Milken wasn't really interested in money. Stein is a lawyer, an economist who knows finance, a good writer, and someone who has a social ethic that goes beyond private profiteering. He might be the only such person in America who can get an occasional book published. He compares Milkenism to organized crime in its "use of underworld tactics of the con and the shakedown, the swindle and the heist, in the world of finance on a national and international scale." If the gruff, cagey Mafia hoods who testified at the Kefauver hearings in 1950 had been slick enough to work in "legitimate" business instead of street-corner gambling and loan-sharking, how much more money would they have been able to make? "Now we know," writes Stein. (page 187)
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