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Lured by the seemingly inexhaustible demand for junk-bond financing, Drexel's Wall Street rivals rushed into the profitable business. The newcomers included such prominent firms as Goldman Sachs, First Boston, Merrill Lynch and Shearson Lehman Hutton. While Drexel's grip on the market gradually slipped, in 1985 it controlled more than half of the new issues. "Drexel is like a god," Michael Boylan, president of the publishing firm Macfadden Holdings, declared in a magazine article that a Drexel executive proudly framed. "They are awesome. You hate to do business against them."
For all its power, Drexel had few friends among its colleagues. Even in an industry of flinty-eyed dealmakers, Drexel's way of doing business struck many people as arrogant and smug. "Dealing with them was repugnant," says an executive of Prudential-Bache Securities. "They had this self-ordained attitude of importance. They broke from all the established rules within the underwriting community."
Drexel's most egregious technique was to force companies into unwanted deals, executives say. In one battle that wound up in court, Staley Continental, a food producer based in suburban Chicago, accused Drexel of trying to pressure Staley executives into launching a buyout bid for their company. Before Staley's $220 million suit reached an out-of-court settlement in 1988, the sensational charges were the talk of Wall Street. "They appealed to your greed," says Robert Hoffman, who was Staley's chief financial officer at the time. "And if that didn't work, they appealed to your fear that someone else might take over your company and throw you out."
As Milken's clout grew, financial journalists described him as the most powerful financier since J.P. Morgan. But Milken's penchant for working by his own rules and controlling every situation proved to be his downfall. Drexel's huge profits and free-wheeling methods attracted the attention of federal prosecutors who believed that, among other offenses, Milken fed inside information to a network of traders to manipulate the stocks of his target companies. Prosecutors first snared Dennis Levine, a Drexel investment banker, who pleaded guilty in 1986 to four counts of profiting from insider trading. The Government then got Levine to implicate Ivan Boesky, a Wall Street speculator, who was fined $100 million for insider trading. He in turn agreed to help prosecutors pursue Milken, who had become the ultimate Mr. Big. (Boesky, bearded and gaunt, now resides in a Brooklyn halfway house, where he is completing a three-year prison sentence.)
Armed with Boesky's testimony, prosecutors threatened to bring racketeering charges against Drexel, which would have permitted the Government to tie up more than $2 billion of the firm's capital. Forced to the wall, Drexel agreed to pay the $650 million and give up Milken, who was indicted last March. He was originally scheduled to come to trial next month, but the Government is considering broad new charges that could delay the case.