Pardon Closes the Book on Milken’s Case but Can’t Rewrite It

After the book was published in 1991, one of Mr. Milken’s former lawyers, Michael Armstrong, sued me, my research assistant and my publisher, claiming $35 million in damages in a case financed by Mr. Milken and his brother. (We won a resounding victory, albeit after nearly a decade of costly litigation.) I returned to the subject of Mr. Milken in an article for The New Yorker about his post-prison deal making while that case was pending.

But since then, Mr. Milken appears to have focused on nurturing his vast wealth (estimated to be in the billions of dollars even after he paid his $600 million fine) and devoting himself to reputation-enhancing charitable pursuits, ably chronicled by other reporters. The 1998 S.E.C. complaint and the threat of a return to prison seem to have worked, and so far as I’m aware, Mr. Milken has avoided the siren call of deal making for others. He deserves credit for his impressive record of good works.

While none of that warrants a presidential pardon, it’s not hard to fathom why Mr. Milken’s saga would resonate with Mr. Trump.

Like the president, Mr. Milken studied business at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania but was largely shunned by New York’s elite.

Mr. Milken’s early clients were corporate raiders who, like Mr. Trump, were disdained by establishment firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Mr. Milken and his junk-bond-fueled takeovers were seen as disruptive forces, threats to a complacent status quo on Wall Street and in corporate America, just as Mr. Trump has upended Washington.

And of course Mr. Milken underwent years of distracting investigations and related bad publicity. He was even represented for a time by Mr. Trump’s celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz (who at one point attacked me in an advertisement in The New York Times). In one of his many startling about-faces, the Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani went from being Mr. Milken’s principal accuser and the architect of his plea deal as U.S. attorney to a Milken champion and advocate for a pardon.

Seen as an underdog, even a very wealthy and well-connected one, Mr. Milken has long inspired a counternarrative that he was a victim of a media and Wall Street establishment jealous of his wealth and success. However unfounded in fact, that version of reality has now gotten a presidential stamp of approval.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/18/business/michael-milken-case-lessons.html