Word: junks
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Even as Milken heard his sentence, the firm he had built into a financial powerhouse was under legal siege once again. Federal regulators earlier this month filed a $6.8 billion claim against the bankrupt Drexel for allegedly rigging the junk-bond market and selling bonds to savings and loans before the value of the IOUs collapsed. The government expects to lose at least $2 billion on junk bonds that it has taken over from seized thrifts. Drexel said it would strongly contest the government claim...
When he emerges from prison, Milken will remain an extravagantly wealthy man. At the height of his power, from 1983 to 1987, Drexel paid him $1.1 billion for pioneering junk bonds and turning them into Wall Street's most lucrative money machine. Instead of squandering the fortune on yachts and jets, Milken formed investment partnerships that earned him additional millions. But riches will not shield Milken from the loss of his freedom. In an 11-page plea for leniency that he wrote to Wood last month, Milken acknowledged, "All people, I am sure, have a fear of incarceration and separation...
...lives with his wife, his 78-year-old mother-in-law and three children in Sloansville, N.Y. (pop. 200). In 1986, Ruckdeschel handed his family's savings, roughly $150,000, to Joseph Ventura, a sales rep from First Investors Corp., one of the country's largest managers of junk-bond mutual funds. Four years later, Ruckdeschel estimates his total losses at $75,000 but doesn't know the exact figure because at each sales call, Ventura would toss out the old records. "He never said anything about any risk -- just that if we needed retirement income, this...
Salesman Ventura refuses to comment, but others who hawked junk for First Investors are less reticent about the company's high-pressure tactics. "I feel like a prostitute," confesses one of them, Mark Loncar, 27, of Aurora, Ill. "But I didn't know any better...
Ruckdeschel, Ventura and Loncar inhabit the lower end of the food chain that fed Michael Milken and a handful of others hundreds of millions of dollars in personal profits during the leveraged-buyout binge of the '80s. Now the continuing collapse of the junk-bond market is starving more than 270,000 First Investors clients, many of whom were lured in by deceptive tactics like those used by Ventura and Loncar. Customer losses nationwide could top $500 million...