The Predators’ Ball Read Online Free

Milken’s first week at Wharton, attended an orientation dinner with him. The two were a little taken aback by Milken’s fellow students, Ivy League graduates dressed in navy blazers and smoking pipes, and they in turn were struck by the two Californians. “They were making fun of us, though in a sort of nice way,” Horowitz recalled. “And I remember Mike told me that evening that he was going to be number one in his class.” Milken did have straight A’s, but because he was short one paper he did not graduate with his class. He later co-authored a paper with one of his professors and received his M.B.A. degree.
    Milken had come to the Philadelphia office of what was then called Drexel Harriman Ripley to apply for a summer job while he was at Wharton, in 1969. Anthony Buford, Jr., then a director of Drexel, recalled that a professor at Wharton, Robert Hagin, recommended Milken for the job. “Bob told me, ‘This is the most astounding young man I’ve ever taught,’ ” said Buford.
    Buford was involved in a corporate-planning effort, analyzing all aspects of the firm. Like many other firms in the late sixties and early seventies, Drexel Harriman Ripley was struggling to weather the crisis of the “paper crunch,” in which back-office systems buckled and sometimes collapsed under the burden of trades, and records of stock and money delivered and received were lost. When Milken arrived, Drexel was in the throes of making the transition in its back office from the clerk with the green eyeshade to computers. Milken, who had spent the previous summer at the accounting firm of Touche Ross, was dispatched to the troubled area.
    While he quickly believed he had divined the solution to the problems, his plan was not implemented. Most of the people in the back office from whom Milken tried to garner information had no more than a high-school education but many years’ worth of experience at their jobs. “Mike was like a bull in a china shop,” recalled a former Drexel executive. “He was terribly arrogant. And he didn’t have the facility to shroud his ability, couldn’t keep it from being threatening and abrasive. This army of operations people were so far beneath him in intellectual powers that he couldn’t deal with them, he could only beat on them. Soon their attitude was, Go talk to somebody else. So he never was able to unlock the system.
    â€œMike’s difficulty, gigantic, was that he simply didn’t have the patience to listen to another point of view,” this former executive continued. “He would assume he had conquered the problem and go forward. He was useless in a committee, in any situation that called for a group decision. He only cared about bringing the truth. If Mike hadn’t gone into the securities business, he could have led a religious revival movement.”
    Whatever his interpersonal shortcomings, Milken was recognized as so high-powered intellectually that he was moved on from the back office to do other special projects, as assistant to the firm’s president, Bertram Coleman, and then his successor, James Stratton. He worked at Drexel part time throughout his two years at Wharton.
    Perhaps his most significant contribution to the firm was his analysis of its securities-delivery system. Drexel, like many Wall Street firms, used to ship securities from city to city and borrow the price of the securities until they were delivered. That delivery often took as long as five days. Milken realized that delivery should be made overnight, thereby cutting the period of interest paymentfrom five days to one. According to its vice-president of operations, Douglas Clark, that idea saved the firm an estimated $500,000 annually.
    When he left Wharton in 1970, he was hired full time at Drexel, to work in the Wall Street office as head of research for fixed-income securities; from there he moved into sales and trading.