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Predators Ball

Drexel Burnham High Yield Bond Conference

The actual name of the gathering was the Drexel Burnham High Yield Bond Conference. They called it the Predators Ball because the most important guests, the people the conference was set up to woo, were the corporate takeover artists who financed their deals (and made Milken and his partners rich) by issuing junk bonds through Drexel Burnham. The Predators Ball was an event that could have taken place only in the US of the 1980's, the decade that finally outdid the 1890's.

Predators Ball is also the name of a landmark publication by New York Times staff writer Connie Bruck (ISBN 0-14-012090-4). Originally published in 1988 by Simon and Schuster, it was the first to blow the whistle on Michael Milken. Connie worked on the book for two and a half years, interviewing almost 300 people. Fred Joseph, CEO at Drexel, agreed to cooperate with Bruck in February, 1986 - a time when the business press universally admired Drexel for their ability to turn junk into gold. Drexel felt unassailable, and for months Bruck kept scribbling while they kept bragging. Then in November 1986 Ivan Boesky pleaded guilty to insider trading and Drexel circled their wagons. Milken offered Bruck $250,000 not to publish the book, while Milken's attorney Arthur Liman (of Iran-Contra fame) obtained a copy of the manuscript despite Simon and Schuster's security precautions, and planned an all-out counterattack with the help of Linda Robinson and her PR firm.

Bruck says that when she started this book, her sympathies were more with Milken than with the corporate establishment that Milken was attacking. It was her willingness to be driven by the evidence that caused Jason McManus, Time Inc.'s editor in chief, to regard this book as 'the finest piece of business investigative journalism since the turn-of-the-century muckrakers, Lincoln Steffens and Upton Sinclair.'

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