In many ways, Ivan Boesky was the archetypical inside trader, brazenly paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for tips. He once said in a speech, “I think greed is healthy,” helping to inspire Hollywood’s “greed is good” line from Gordon Gekko, Michael Douglas’s cutthroat character in "Wall Street." At the height of his fortune, he was thought to have been worth more than $200 million, $80 million of which he admitted had directly resulted from insider trading.
Mr. Boesky lost most of that in a plea agreement with federal prosecutors in 1986. He paid five times in fines what Rajaratnam is accused of netting from insider trading. But prosecutors agreed to give Boesky a lighter sentence in exchange for working with them to catch other inside traders, most notably Michael Milken. Mr. Milken, the “junk bond king,” was subsequently also charged with insider trading, but prosecutors dropped it in a plea deal on lesser charges.
