Word: walls
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...battle to control RJR Nabisco has pitted some of Wall Street's most powerful investment houses against one another, but the financial muscle behind the bidding is really the legacy of one man: Michael Milken. It is not just that Milken's firm, Drexel Burnham Lambert, is bankrolling the Kohlberg Kravis Roberts bid to the tune of $5 billion. Milken's role is much grander and far more controversial. The boyish moneyman with the tousled toupee and the obsessive work habits has almost single-handedly sparked the frenzy of takeovers and buyouts that has given the Roaring Eighties their name...
...Milken who created and has dominated the market for junk bonds, the high-octane financial fuel that powers many of today's most daring Wall Street deals. The volume of these bonds has zoomed from less than $1 billion in 1981 to more than $175 billion today. In the process, Milken, 42, has amassed a fortune of at least $500 million and a reputation as the most influential financier since J.P. Morgan...
...expected criminal charges could heavily damage Drexel, the fifth largest U.S. investment firm and the fastest-growing powerhouse on Wall Street. Rudolph Giuliani, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, is likely to follow the SEC in accusing Drexel and Milken of collaborating with convicted arbitrager Ivan Boesky to defraud the firm's clients, trade on insider information and conceal the true ownership of stocks -- all, presumably, in the pursuit of greater profits and power. Milken's lawyers, for their part, accuse the Government of a vindictive campaign based solely on self-serving testimony by Boesky...
Milken's junk-bond department, which he moved from Manhattan to Beverly Hills not long after he formed it a decade ago, quickly became the engine of the Wall Street firm's furious growth. One reason is that junk bonds earn hefty fees: Drexel charges 3% to 4% of an offering's total value, compared with a fee of less than 1% for a higher-grade issue. Milken's web of buyers and sellers for the bonds has given him a virtual lock on the market, though the entry of such competitors as Morgan Stanley and First Boston has whittled...
Even as Johnson backed away from his huge initial stake, rival bidders rushed in to get theirs. The competing offers turned the fight for RJR Nabisco, whose brands range from Animals Crackers to Winston cigarettes, into the brassiest and potentially most damaging brawl in Wall Street history. By last week three groups were locked in a titanic struggle for the company (1987 revenues: $15.8 billion), and the offering price has climbed above $26 billion -- more than the gross national product of Peru or Portugal and twice the sum that Chevron paid for Gulf Oil in 1984 in the largest previous...