The Fall of a Wall Street Superstar

New York City's stock markets had closed for the week when the stunning announcement came. Even so, the bombshell sent the U.S. financial world reeling. In Washington, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman John Shad announced that Manhattan-based Ivan Boesky, one of Wall Street's richest and most frenetically active individual speculators, had been snared in the biggest insider-trading case ever. In a consent decree Boesky, 49, had agreed to pay $100 million, which Shad described as "by far the largest" settlement obtained by the SEC for insider-trading activity. After a 16 1/2-month transition period in which Boesky will gradually dispose of his...