-Caveat Lector- <http://opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=85000584> THE CLINTON LEGACY Unpardoned Meet Michael Milken, the man the ex-president deemed unworthy of clemency. BY DOROTHY RABINOWITZ Tuesday, February 13, 2001 12:01 a.m. EST Two days after the publication of the long and by now notorious list of those receiving presidential pardons, Michael Milken went off to Yale to deliver a lecture. Unlike Marc Rich (among the FBI's most-wanted fugitives) or Almon G. Braswell (convicted of perjury and mail fraud in 1983, and currently the object of another criminal investigation), Mr. Milken had been refused a pardon. At Yale, a young woman student wanted to know what it was he had done, anyway. "I was eight years old," she explained. She meant in the 1980s, the time of RICO, Ivan Boesky, and a high-profile prosecution that would transform financier Michael Milken into a prime symbol of the greed decade--as the era was known in the selfless '90s--causing him to spend two years in a federal prison. It was a story for another day, he told the student, curious about all the talk of his pardon, or lack of one. Recalling the moment while in New York last week, he observed: "I had the greatest pardon of all--eight years of additional life. I got to see my three children grow up. That, to me, is my pardon." He refers, of course, to the 1993 diagnosis of his advanced prostate cancer, at which time doctors informed him he had little more than a year to live. By then cancer had claimed seven members of his family, among them his father, whose 1979 death from melanoma had been particularly devastating to a son confronting--perhaps for the first time in a bountifully successful life--a sense of hopelessness and defeat. "For all my skill and capacity to solve problems it was clear I wasn't going to be able to find a way to save my father's life." They are a far cry from the feelings he exudes these days as he goes about promoting cancer research, buoyant, determined and, from all appearances, a man unburdened by resentments. Some close to him are less serene, especially about the Securities and Exchange Commission's campaign against his pardon. "The attack the SEC mounted against Mike far exceeded anything the FBI did against a pardon for [Leonard] Peltier, accused of murdering two FBI agents," says attorney Richard Sandler, a longtime Milken associate. The SEC claimed, in a letter to the pardons office, that Mr. Milken had after his release "secretly" violated orders preventing him from engaging in activity as a securities broker. In the mid-1990s the agency began an investigation into three transactions in which Michael Milken had given strategic consulting advice, upon being advised by counsel, that he could do so. "Some secret activities," Mr. Sandler observes. "Those transactions were public, written about in all the papers, with Mike's name included." And when the SEC finished its year-and-a-half-long investigation, it agreed it would impose no fine or penalty and would not allege willful violation of the court order. Mr. Milken in turn would give back some $47 million in fees and interest. In the midst of his struggle with cancer, Michael Milken had, Mr. Sandler says, no interest in a prolonged legal war and had therefore signed a consent agreement neither admitting nor denying any of the allegations. At the same time, the U.S. attorney's office, which had also investigated the matter, concluded, in a report to the judge, that on the basis of its own investigation, the fact that the law was unclear on the issue involved, and the fact that Mr. Milken in no way misled the court, it would recommend no action. To claim, now, that Mike Milken had willfully violated the court order and that he had given false testimony when even a U.S. attorney found he had done no such thing, Mr. Sander avers, is pure misrepresentation. To all queries about matters of this kind--attacks on his character and motives, references to his alleged great crimes--Mr. Milken himself responds with what can only be described as a clinician's interest. He has clearly decided to regard these things as phenomena, curiosities of human behavior to understand. "People have certain biases and beliefs they have to maintain," he explains, with some patience. The tone can change, to be sure, when he is pressed to consider the way in which the press described him in its coverage of those alleged great criminal conspiracies, and even today. He recalls, with a thin smile, a person in the newspaper business years back, a man who knew about writing and reporters. "If you're unsuccessful as a reporter on the sports page, he told me, they generally moved you to the financial pages. On the sports page you had to be precise. Someone won, someone lost, someone had a certain batting average. In financial writing you could say almost anything." That he has his mind on matters very different from these old battles, no one can doubt. He has his focus, namely the war on cancer, and it is consuming--an enterprise driven by the same energies he once applied to the study of financial structures. This can't be surprising, he points out: Life is a continuum. In New York on behalf of CapCURE, his foundation for the cure of prostate cancer, he found time for a talk, though he has of late declined all requests for interviews. In the small room at a Sloan-Kettering facility, phones ring, people pop in to deliver messages, others have wandered into the wrong office, usually in the middle of one of his more complicated thoughts. None of this appears to perturb him. He is uninterruptible, he is focused. In prison, it helped, of course, to be able to concentrate. It is hard to detect any darkness in his reflections on that time, a period in which he tutored fellow inmates in math and other skills. He did what he had to do, he notes, nor did he ever feel demeaned by washing floors and windows. Michael Milken washed a lot more floors and windows than most other prisoners of his education ever had to do in federal prison, Richard Sandler notes. Typically, a college-educated person performs orderly duties for a week or so, and then is allowed to tutor or do similar work. "Basically, they had him cleaning up, doing floors, for a long, long time. It didn't bother him. He developed math games for guys in his cell, they could show off to their children on visiting days." Finally, Mr. Sandler says, after months doing cleanup, they allowed him to spend his time tutoring. Before Michael Milken went to prison, they had heard a hundred times that he would be treated like everyone else. "He never was treated like everyone else. He was treated far worse." There was the prison to which he had been sent, for one thing--not the one recommended by Judge Kimba Wood, but Pleasanton, in Dublin, Calif., a desolate institution and one, said Mr. Sandler, that even a lead prosecutor in the Milken case had described as one of the worst federal prison camps he had ever seen. He had driven Mike Milken there the day he was due to enter in March 1991, and it remains a bleak memory to Richard Sandler. He recalls the long ride with Mr. and Mrs. Milken, how all three had talked about absolutely everything but where they were headed. In fact, Michael Milken was at that point headed to the beginning of a 10-year incarceration, a term handed down by Judge Wood, who would later drastically cut the sentence. He had come prepared, in a way, for the 22 months he did spend behind bars; he had after all seen his freedom curtailed long before he entered prison. At the height of all the furor and accusations and all the legal struggles, the symbol of the greed decade went off to do as he had been doing since his youth--that is, teaching inner-city children. Every day he went to St. Josephs School at 127th Street and Morningside Heights. "That way I could live in the real world rather than what I saw as a world of unreality." He is accustomed to charges, lately renewed by those passionately opposed to his pardon (they had not as yet had Marc Rich to worry about) that his philanthropic endeavors were mere public-relations efforts. It is a point of view, of course, that regularly ignores the history of Mr. Milken's social endeavors--the Milken Family Foundations devoted to medical research, education for minority children and the like, all of which were undertaken years before Michael Milken could have dreamed of legal troubles, government prosecutors, and the ruin it would all bring. For a time, at least. Now, the past is the past, everything in his manner says, as he pauses, occasionally, to muse over allegations made about his greed, for example. "By 1975," he says, "I was independently wealthy. I never needed to make money again." He does not, indeed, live like a man devoted to wealth for what it can buy. He has lived, since 1978, in a comparatively modest house in the San Fernando Valley, decidedly not a neighborhood in which the very rich live. He works 15 hours a day, and does it happily. He had made certain promises to himself to drive the effort to find cancer solutions, and he drives incessantly, with absolute belief. Every day he makes it a point to talk to five people with cancer--sometimes for five minutes, sometimes a half-hour. "It helps me keep my focus," he explains. It is hard to imagine him losing it, easy to see how he has come to this. It is, he says, difficult for him to hold on to grievances, not now and not before. He is, he recalls, the man who used to tell people working under him on Wall Street: "Revenge is not a productive emotion." During the first large cancer march in 1998, which he chaired, he met a woman whose six-year-old daughter had died the day before. They had been looking forward to coming to the march together. Another daughter had died of the same disease 10 years earlier. When the march was over he had sat by the memorial wall looking at the notes parents had left children, sisters had left brothers. "I might feel that what happened to me was unfair or worse" he says, with a rush of feeling, "but what is it compared to a child who has died of leukemia?" The man without a pardon is off now, to plan the next conference, the next search for solutions. Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. ================================================================= Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT FROM THE DESK OF: *Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends ================================================================= <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. 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