Inside Out

Dennis Levine was a middle-class boy from the Queens district of New York. His financial acumen propelled him up through the tiers of Wall Street until at the age of 32 he was a managing director of Drexel Burnham Lambert, specializing in corporate take-overs. He was earning nearly $2 million a year, but his salary was insignificant compared with the gains he made from insider-trading and salted away in a secret bank account in Switzerland, unknown even to his wife. In detail Levine traces the deals that, with the help of accomplices such as Milken and Boesky, funded his life-style in a Park Avenue apartment decorated with Picassos. His addiction to the risks and thrills of his illegal operation - when his entire fortune was sometimes riding on the results of a take-over bid - was so great that even when he knew the SEC was getting suspicious he just couldn't stop trading. But officers of the bank where he was making his deposits were following his insider information on their own account and their "piggy-back" dealing eventually led to his detection and arrest in 1986.
Levine describes his imprisonment and looks back over "a decade of shame" in Wall Street that ended with the downfall of many of the firms and colleagues he depicts.