Alex Drost’s Bookshelf

Den of Thieves

Stewart's Pulitzer-backed account of the 1980s insider-trading scandal that took down Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, Martin Siegel and Dennis Levine. He traces how the junk-bond boom and the arbitrage desks were wired together by illicit information flow, and how the case was built by flipping each man against the next.

Core idea The 1980s takeover boom ran on stolen information, which means the returns were not skill and were never risk-adjusted