Levine, Dennis - True Confessions of an Inside ...

TRUE CONFESSIONS OF AN INSIDE TRADER

The saga of the white-collar crook who led the feds to Boesky and Milken is a sad tale of energetic mediocrity. You may enjoy it.

By GIL SCHWARTZ

October 7, 1991

(FORTUNE Magazine) – Dennis Levine did a bad thing; he admits that now. He is, without doubt, sincerely sorry, and why shouldn't he be? He is basically an honest guy who just, uh, just . . . lost sight of the solid values that had been driven into him since childbirth -- yeah, that's it. And because he gets seduced by money and power, he makes a tiny error in taste and judgment and begins doing a bad thing, which everyone was doing but he knows he's to blame, no one else. At any rate, one day everybody finds out about this guy, and he has to give back more than $12 million and his Ferrari Testarossa and then he goes to jail, where he leads fellow inmates on the piano in a tune called ''The Lewisburg Blues.'' 

OK, let's face it. Inside Out (G.P. Putnam's Sons, $22.95), by Levine and co-author William Hoffer, is no Crime and Punishment, no tale of an existentialist Raskolnikov plumbing the bottom of human experience from the inception of his heinous crime to the moment of his comeuppance. Instead, the autobiography of the man whose arrest at 33 for insider trading led to the convictions of Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken is a tale of heedless, energetic mediocrity. If, like me, you have a taste for seeing evil punished, no matter how banal it may be, you just might enjoy this saga.

Banal is the key word. After a semi-dramatic prologue in which our antihero is caught like a weasel in a cage, we flip back to his crashingly ordinary upbringing in the New York City borough of Queens. We then track his early career at Citibank ($19,000 per year), move to the generic vapidity of his first true business job at Smith Barney ($31,000 per year), sprint to the frenetic if still trite years at Lehman Brothers ($50,000, plus a big guaranteed bonus), and at last arrive at the pinnacle of power at Drexel Burnham Lambert, where his take reached more than $2 million a year and he didn't stop for a minute to consider what he was doing.

Levine and his ghostwriter never use an original, hard-won image when a time-honored cliche will do. Of his first night in jail: ''The silence reminded me of how totally removed I was, at the moment, from everyone and everything I loved.'' Uh-huh. ''The air was cold and somehow foreboding. Here I was, fallen to the very bottom of the heap.'' Wow. That's low.

When Levine goes to the Caribbean to open a bank account to hold his nefarious gains, he steps off the plane and observes that ''gorgeous, ebony-faced children hover around any obvious tourist, ready to smile broadly at evidence of a camera.'' Don't it make you feel like you're really there?

Along the way he serves up heavy dollops of post-1980s sincerity. Although this solemnity produces a few scattered laughs, if there's a single intentionally light moment in this book, I invite you to find it. This quip may come closest: ''Our Paris luncheon, held at the Hotel Ritz, featured Norwegian salmon, accompanied by Chablis-Abbage 1976 and Chateau-Giscours 1969. This, I realized, is the civilized way to sell convertible debentures.'' ^

A careful reader may also share my suspicion that Dennis's book was vetted by his wife, Laurie. ''She is the most exquisite and captivating woman I have ever known,'' he notes with uncharacteristic gusto, ''but beneath the beauty is a warm, sensitive, and highly intelligent individual.'' Such goose fat would be easier to take if one did not get the solid impression that inside our narrator is a very cold man with tremendous analytical strength, a totally flaccid moral muscle, and the ability to rationalize anything.

These are powerful assets in any business, but do not make for tasty company over 401 pages. FOR MAKE NO MISTAKE, the only events that truly engaged Dennis Levine's passion -- aside perhaps from small and oh-so-precious moments with his otherwise neglected family -- were big, debt-driven acquisitions and mergers that laid off thousands of people and enriched only a select few. About these, he is quite interesting. The architecture of the deals he helped finance provides for this book the kind of heft and technical credibility that Melville's whale blubber scenes do for Moby-Dick. The deals also make for juicy reading.

Raider James Goldsmith goes after Crown Zellerbach -- and we are there, watching Levine, superbly attuned to the human side of the deal, helping less adroit money managers move toward a resolution of the problems that divide them. Plump, savvy Ron Perelman has got to have Revlon, but in the way stands arrogant, imperious Michel Bergerac, desperate to keep his job as CEO at all costs. Slam! Crunch. Zetz. The deals come down. The raiders make millions. Levine makes millions. Everybody makes millions. It's almost exciting.

What keeps the banality safe and warm is Levine's amazing lack of moral proportion. Over and over, he blithely details, without apology, deals that would make a lesser man cringe. He recalls that after forcing Phillips Petroleum into a recapitalization plan, investor T. Boone Pickens stood to reap a pretax profit of nearly $90 million. ''It was not a classic case of greenmail wherein only the raider reaped the rewards,'' Levine hastens to add. ''Pickens had previously vowed never to accept such money, but he agreed to this plan because all the shareholders would benefit.''

Well, bravo, Boone! After a while, Levine's heroic litany of dubious deals and endless paeans to the democratization of capital get nauseating. Even at this late date, with the U.S. economy staggering under debt and bad paper, he regards the legacy of the 1980s with unqualified satisfaction: ''There was no question that American industry now exhibited a more svelte profile, positioned to compete more efficiently with the growing threats from foreign businesses.''

Tell that to now-British J. Walter Thompson, now-Japanese Columbia Pictures, and now-German Bantam/Doubleday/Dell. One man's svelte profile is another man's corpse. In short, while it has its moments, Inside Out is not an easy book to like. It lacks the one property that exercises of this sort are supposed to provide in spades: insight. Oh sure, after he's suffered, Levine achieves a new, richer level of banality -- more humble, with a new sensitivity to ethics and with more time for the things-that-really-matter. But what's his answer to the evil of insider trading?

No, not changing the way we make deals. And not more severe penalties, either. What we need to do, he says, is to increase the possibility of being apprehended. In other words, it's all about getting caught. And that, ethical-sensitivity fans, will have to do.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1991/10/07/75547/index.htm