It was a long book, but it was fascinating to read about the market manipulation, the workings of the mafia-like Milken camp, and the greed and lies that kept the crimes going. But I was so glad when I got to the part where prosecutors were able to convict the main players of the insider trading rings. Although some had leaner sentencing than they deserved, it was nice to see that even ridiculous amounts of money can’t save a guilty man from his crimes.

The rise and fall of Michael Milken and Drexel. Essential reading for anyone interested in the development of financial markets. Well written and very detailed.

Den of Thieves was a fascinating look into the culture and corruption surrounding 1980's Wall Street and the cast of characters that profited immensely, and then suffered dearly as a result. Much of the story read like a movie (of course the film "Wall Street" is loosely based on these events), and the author (James Stewart) goes into tremendous detail on the relationships, conversations, and inner-workings of various banks, brokers, and traders who shared inside information to earn personal profits, and profits for their friends/clients.

Much of the story revolves around the tremendous rise of Michael Milken, and his creation of the junk (or high yield) bond division at Drexel Burnham, which were used to finance Leveraged Buyouts and massive takeovers that were all the rage of the 1980's. Arbitrageurs, like Ivan Boesky, were able to use tips from bankers at Drexel, Kidder Peabody, Goldman, and others to trade of the information of a pending merger. What was fascinating to me was how simple and corrupt it all was. Traders (like Boesky, Dennis Levine, and others) would communicate around the clock looking for inside information on what companies were "in play" - or about to be purchased. The banks (and lawyers) had all the info since they were financing the deals or brokering the acquisitions. The traders would simply buy up the stock of the company about to be acquired, then sell it once the news broke and the share price ran up. Many were deeply involved in the scheme, which included stock parking, bribes, payoffs, tax evasion, etc.

It was incredible to see how a few people on Wall Street took advantage of a low-regulatory environment to make hundreds of millions of dollars, and ultimately took down well-established investment banks and transformed Wall Street forever.

One can't help but reflect on the power of greed and how many of the characters (most of which were making millions of dollars legitimately), sacrificed so much just to make more - nothing was ever enough. In the end, they all paid with jail time, and hundreds of millions in fines. Though the criticism is that they did not pay enough, as many still came out as multi-millionaires through their ability to hide much of their massive wealth.

This is a great read for anyone interested in the high-flying and blatantly corrupt culture of 80's Wall Street. My only critique is the end of the book drags a bit as the author gets into the minutiae of the legal proceedings, and it becomes difficult to follow the many characters he introduces.

It is not often that I stumble upon a book so thick(534 pages and appendix), and still manage to finish it with as much zeal as with which I had picked it up at the first place.
This book was touted by others to be an iconic work on Wall Street shenanigans, and in my opinion, this lives up to the high standards it had set for itself. For me, this is right up there with Barbarians at the Gate and the Big Short.
This is one of those books when you begin rooting for one of those fallen heroes, who, even though in the end goes to prison, strikes a chord with the middle class aspirational humans we all are.
5 stars, for each word it has!!!

The abridged audio book was a quick 3 hour overview that was interesting enough. I didn’t really follow what the financial crimes were, but it was an good look at how some people are convinced the only reason other people are succeeding is because everyone else is breaking the law, so they do it, which then eventually makes that the reality.

Part of the disgust with Washington and big business stems from the slew of mergers and acquisitions that began during the seventies and eighties and which resulted in many people losing their jobs as the larger entities pulled cash out of the acquisitions, cut jobs, and moved much of the business overseas for cheaper labor costs. In part, what drove the acquisitions mania was the tax code that taxed dividends and profits from a business or stocks and made interest costs fully deductible. It paid therefore to borrow any amount to purchase a company driving the stock price up and then reselling the same company to someone else. The brokers in the middle as well as the managers of those companies became insanely rich from the shell game.

One surprising tidbit that surprised me was how Milliken and others manipulated the press to achieve movement in stock prices and to get what they wanted. By carefully planting stories they could build momentum for mergers and speculation that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. The stock price would move in whatever direction they wanted.

It was shameful how Ivan Boesky was hailed by business magazines and university departments as some kind of business genius. His speeches were lauded and yet he achieved what he did purely by cheating.

It's instructive given today's PR strategies by the White House to see how Wall Street and the business community responded to SEC investigations and indictments. Once the information about Boesky's crimes and his indictment was released, the attacks on the SEC began. They discovered that the SEC had permitted Boesky to sell $400,000,000 of his position for a couple of reasons: the SEC wanted to make sure he would have money to pay the $100,000,000 fine he had agreed to in his plea, and they were worried that if news got out prematurely the market would tank and many investors would get hurt. As it was, his investors made a lot of money and the fine was paid. But that knowledge was used against the SEC by the business media (and others who had been guilty of the same insider trading) as a way to focus attention away from themselves and to make the SEC look bad, paving the way for future emasculation of the agency, already underfunded. The charge was that the SEC was letting Boesky get away with millions, an untruth. 

Boesky today lives in California and as a result of his 1991 divorce settlement, his wife (!) paid him $23 million and $180,000 per years. Not too shabby.

Millkin and others involved made literally billions, some served prison terms, almost all came out of it quite comfortably. My own feeling is the deck is stacked against the average investor and that the whole idea of leveraged buyouts hurts everyone except those who orchestrate the deals and collect the fees. Then again, my pension relies on a healthy and growing stock market, so perhaps my complaints should be muted.

I read this book years ago and never forgot it. It ranks in the best ten books that I have ever read and the author's research is exhaustive and detailed. This research is then presented in a way that makes it near impossible to put this masterpiece down. A superb book, a superb author and the easiest of five star rankings.

Really solid and detailed stuff. Mandatory read for all interested in finance.

You hear all about the excesses on Wall St of the 1980s but I don't recall hearing about Michael Milken and, how in a half decade, he amassed the largest private fortune of all time. Unbelievable in the perniciousnes of the crimes and even more unbelievable are the dollar amounts especially considering this was the 80s. Makes you feel very insignificant in the overall economy....concretes the fact that self preservation/interest trumps ethics nearly every time.

Pretty good, even exciting in parts.
Includes so many characters that it can get very hard to remember the relevant points about each as they reappear. The list of characters helps a bit.
The behaviour on Wall St in the eighties was outrageous, and that’s just the bits we know about. The scandals that were never revealed could be far worse. Less regulated markets like NZ unimaginably so. Aaaargh. Ouch.
Something new: while being prosecuted, Milken was spending millions per week on defence, and on PR. That worked for him. If you think that Boesky was the real crook, who got off lightly, and that Milken was generally a good guy — then that’s that good PR spending paying off for Milken.

Den of Thieves is a rollercoaster of what the fuck moments and unbelievably stupid occurrences that led to a tear in the fabric that is the US financial system. James B. Stewart takes us through the junk bond crazes of the 1980's, the cutthroat world of LBO's, the brutal world of leveraged takeovers, and all the marvelously bumbling idiots behind insider trading rings at top banks in the country like Goldman Sachs. He takes use from New York to Beverly hills and details the rise of figures like Dennis Levine, Michael Milken, and Ivan Boesky. He doesn't just show us who they were and what they did but tracks the movements of these corporate raiders and pioneers through every aspect of their interview through phone conversations, financial agreements/ shady arrangements, and all down to their personal lives and the way they spent and moved around their money in attempts to hide it. The novel however doesn't just stick to the side of the bad guys and their corrupt chase for profits but it also does an amazing job at telling the DOJ response as well as the SEC. It shows all the details and depositions in the government effort to take down big players as corrupt as Michael Milken. It tells the inner members of the circle and how they eventually betray their leaders to oust the higher ups. It even details the legal journey all these key players went through and the following reforms that occurred. This book does an amazing job at taking another story that can seem mundane or boring from the outside as another book that talks about finance and instead turns it into a book on the same level as a mystery novel. The characters are well described, the interactions and events are extremely well researched, and multiple perspectives are told in the story stopping it from becoming a biased and one sided telling of a story with many sides. Because of the amazing telling and all those factors this book deserves five stars. I had a hard time putting it down and doing my schoolwork while I read it and I know when I come back to it again the same will follow.

There were parts of this book that got a little monotonous and slow, however that's mostly due to the legalese used. I found this book extremely intriguing. It's about white collar crime and Wall Street, and it gives insight to both the defendants and the prosecutors that tried their cases. While I was alive during this time, I was young enough that I had no knowledge of the happenings. Admittedly, the thought of how easy it was in the '80s to make such vast amounts of wealth astound me. It gives a whole new meaning to the idea of the "Me Decade."