The Predators' Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the JunkBond Raiders

During the 1980s, Michael Milken at Drexel Burnham Lambert was the Billionaire Junk Bond King. He invented such things as “the highly confident letter” (I’m highly confident that I can raise the money you need to buy company X) and “the blind pool” (Here’s a billion dollars: let us help you buy a company), and he financed the biggest corporate raiders—men like Carl Icahn and Ronald Perelman.

And then, on September 7, 1988, things changed. The Securities and Exchange Commission charged Mil...