Ivan Boesky

Ivan F. Boesky, the brash financier who came to symbolize Wall Street greed as a central figure of the 1980s insider trading scandals, and who went to prison for his misdeeds, died on Monday at his home in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego. He was 87. His daughter Marianne Boesky said he died in his sleep. In November 1986, Ivan Boesky, a leading Wall Street arbitrageur, was sentenced to 3½ years in prison, agreed to pay a $100 million fine and has been barred for life from the securities industry to settle the insider trading charges. Boesky had begun making cash payoffs to Kidder Peabody investment banker Marin Siegel in 1982, in exchange for insider information on upcoming mergers and acquisitions deals. He spent two years of his sentence in jail. As part of his deal, Boesky also informed on other White Collar Rogues, including Michael Milken. Ivan Frederick Boesky was born in Detroit on March 6, 1937, to Helen and William Boesky. His father was a Jewish immigrant from Russia. The family ran a string of restaurants under the name Brass Rail that became strip clubs as the city declined. The business eventually went bankrupt. He attended three colleges — Wayne State, the University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan — and graduated from none of them. It took him five years, after dropping out twice, to get a degree in 1964 from the Detroit College of Law. Through his first wife, Seema Boesky, he was part owner of the celebrated Beverly Hills Hotel. His marriage in 1962 was to Seema Silberstein, a daughter of Ben Silberstein, a real estate developer. Boesky’s closest ally in the world of finance was Michael Milken, head of Drexel Burnham’s fabled junk bond desk in Los Angeles. After turning himself in to federal investigators, Mr. Boesky, in an appeal for leniency, agreed to become a government informant, wearing a wire when meeting with Mr. Milken — who was an even bigger target of federal prosecutors. Boesky pleaded guilty to insider trading charges in November 1986 and agreed to pay $100 million — a $50 million fine and $50 million in repayment of illegal trading profits. (He was later able to deduct half of his $100 million penalty from his income taxes.) He was sentenced to a three-year prison term and spent 18 months at the Lompoc federal prison camp, a minimum-security facility in Santa Barbara County, Calif., followed by four months at a Brooklyn halfway house. He emerged from prison in 1990. He was 53. In 1991, his wife of 30 years sued him for divorce. Pleading poverty, he asked for half of her $100 million fortune; he settled for $20 million, annual payments of $180,000 and a $2.5 million California home. For many years, Mr. Boesky lived quietly in La Jolla, where he remarried and became a father again. In addition to his daughter Marianne, he is survived by three sons from his first marriage, William, Theodore and Johnathan; his wife, Ana (Serrano) Boesky; their daughter, Blu Boesky; and four grandchildren.