Highly Confident: The Crime and Punishment of Michael Milken

Milken, the junk-bond king who is now in prison for masterminding a securities fraud and embezzlement scheme, is not an arch-villain, asserts Kornbluth, but a myopic, tragic figure whose ``mass disconnection from reality'' blinded him to such mundane considerations as whether he was breaking any laws. The villain of this taut, riveting account of Wall Street's biggest scandal, which reads like a thriller, is arbitrageur Ivan Boesky, who is portrayed as an amoral liar who seduced Milken into illegal activities. Kornbluth, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair , interviewed Milken, his lawyers and his associates at length to produce a stunning tale of greed and self-deception packed with revelations and reconstructed conversations. He tells how Milken and his cronies at the Drexel Burnham Lambert investment firm hired several detective agencies (including a squad of ex-Mossad agents) to find out whether Boesky had socked away tens of millions of dollars in Swiss banks. He re-creates the turf war between the prosecutor in the case, ambitious U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani, and Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Richard Breeden. He reveals that then-U.S. Attorney Gen. Dick Thornburgh overruled a possible settlement deal between Milken and the U.S. Attorney's office. He adds fresh details on the wheeling and dealing of T. Boone Pickens, Carl Icahn, Saul Steinberg, Steve Wynn and other high rollers. With rare insight, Kornbluth penetrates Milken's guru-like, deliberately ambiguous persona. A mad hunger for accumulation drove this Los Angeles-born middle-class Jewish prodigy, son of a rigid accountant, emotionally scarred by polio, to become a ``high-performance machine,'' described by one colleague as ``a borderline schizophrenic who reintegrates reality in a way that best suits him.'' Obsessed with remaining obscure, Milken, ironically, became the most notorious man in the securities industry. And Salomon Brothers, ``the firm that wished Milken vaporized,'' is now the biggest buyer of junk bonds and an adviser to the government agency that sells the junk of seized S&Ls--a cushy arrangement that Washington would never have allowed Drexel to enjoy. Photos. First serial to Vanity Fair; author tour. (Aug.) .