Predators' fall - case against Michael Milken

WHAT MICHAEL MILKEN, the high-yield bond wizWard, may be guilty of, or whether he is guilty of anything at all, is now in the hands of the lawthough considering the whimsicality of securities regulations, the word "law" is surely too dignified. Milken is unquestionably guilty of breaking one law, however, which, though it is on no statute book, is rigorously enforced: the social law that outsiders must know their place.

For years, the Drexel High Yield Bond Conference, a/k/a the Predators' Ball-an annual conference, half sales pitch, half revival meeting, over which Milken used to preside-has been a favorite set-piece of business journalists. The keynote of all descriptions was its outlandishness. It was held at the Hilton in Beverly Hills, not on the East Coast, Meetings began at 6:00 A.M., in deference to Milken, who rises at 4:30. The entertainment at one conference included a video of Madonna, decked out in trashy jewelry and little else, slinking around and singing "I'm a Double B Girl in a High Yield World-Drexel, Drexel, Drexel."

Then there were the people. Milken grew up in the Valley, as in Valley girls, and lives there still. He is Jewish, as were many of his partners and peers. (Indeed, about the only sympathy he has gotten is from those who see his prosecution as an instance of antiSemitism.) But there were non-Jews too: Carl Lindner, a Baptist supermarket-chain owner from Cincinnati; Rupert Murdoch, the Australian press mogul.

This was not a white-shoe crowd. It was not even wannabe white-shoe. Pete Peterson, the Greek dinerowner's son from Kearney, Nebraska, might aspire to be chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations. Milken & Co. didn't want status credentialing. They wanted money. They saw their opportunity in an economic area-high-risk bonds-that the establishment had not exploited, and they took it.

The establishment, in this case, most definitely includes the press, which fancies itself as a band of renegades, but which, in fact, craves status as desperately as the worst Thackeray toady (all that talk about the fourth branch of government). It's no surprise that the establishment resented the predators' rise, and now gloats over their fall; no surprise that the attorney who led some of them out of their offices in handcuffs is now the establishment's candidate to be mayor of New York. No surprise, perhaps, but a source of real misgivings.