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During law school in 1962, Boesky married Seema Silberstein, the daughter of Ben Silberstein, a real estate tycoon. After Boesky had made several stabs at starting a career, the young couple decided to move to New York City, where Silberstein set them up in a Park Avenue apartment. Boesky found a calling at last on Wall Street, where he landed a job as a stock analyst at the L.F. Rothschild investment firm. In 1975, when Boesky started his first arbitrage firm with $700,000 in capital, the Silberstein fortune helped bankroll it.
Boesky seemed determined to become richer than his father-in-law. His zealousness shocked the arbitrage business, which had been accustomed to small, cautious investments. Boesky frequently bet the ranch, sometimes tens of millions of dollars, on single takeover bids. His gambles usually succeeded, which he attributed to an unheard-of emphasis on doing his homework. He got plenty of help from an army of 100 bustling employees. Once established, Boesky sought to become the goodwill ambassador of the arbitrage trade. Yet he tended to make an uneasy impression with his smile, flashing a set of gleaming teeth at the oddest moments without any hint of mirth.
Boesky works like a machine and claims to sleep only two or three hours a night. He rises at 4:30 each morning and climbs into his chauffeured limousine with IFB-initialed license plates. At work in a vast, white marble suite of offices above Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, Boesky stands behind his desk and punches buttons on a 300-line telephone console as he studies flickering stock-market figures on a battery of video screens. Almost always clad in a dark three-piece suit, with the vest adorned by a gold watch chain, he continuously slurps coffee and information, the two fuels he seems to crave most.
Last week Boesky, who has three sons and a daughter, spent much of his time folding up ambitious personal and social commitments he has made. He scrapped a grand plan to remodel the family's ten-bedroom house, situated on 200 acres of land in New York's Westchester County, to look like Jefferson's Monticello. Far more painful, no doubt, was his decision to withdraw from the many prominent positions that had given him a measure of social status, including his posts as a trustee of the American Ballet Theater and finance director for the National Jewish Coalition. He canceled a $1.5 million grant to Princeton University, which a son attends. Boesky had often given lavishly to charities but irritated some fund raisers with his hard bargaining for control and recognition. "There are givers and users. He is a user," claims one.
Boesky and his wife took pride in their controlling interest in the Beverly Hills Hotel, though it was won in a bitter family struggle. Boesky's father-in-law had bought the hotel in the early 1950s and left 48% ownership to each of his daughters, Seema and her sister Muriel Slatkin. Muriel and Husband Burton ran the hotel until 1980, when the Boeskys managed to buy the remaining 4% stake from another relative.