From Michael Kinsley:
The crooked junk-bond king and his sleazy defenders
But the laws Milken has admitted breaking are not “technical” in the sense that they were broken unintentionally, by stepping slightly over a fuzzy line. He knew he was breaking important, laws. And in a couple of cases—helping an associate to arrange a phony tax loss, and “point shaving” (essentially, ripping off customers by tiny fractions that add up to big money)—the inherent rights and wrongs are not even ambiguous.
But these crimes are just what Milken pleaded guilty to. At the same time, he also settled a civil suit by the Securities and Exchange Commission. That civil suit accused him of a potpourri of classic financial frauds, from straightforward insider trading (profiting from secret knowledge of deals he was involved in) to payola (bribing money managers to buy his securities for their clients) to falsifying and destroying records. In settling—and agreeing to pay $400 million to his victims—Milken does not concede guilt. But he may not assert his innocence, either. We will know next tall, when the government produces its memorandum for Milken’s sentencing, what evidence it had on these other matters. Milken’s defenders say he was bullied into a guilty plea by the unfair threat of prosecution under the racketeering (RICO) law. I bet that when we see the goods, Milken’s jail term and $600 million fine will look like a good deal for him.
So why did he do it when he was making hundreds of millions of dollars legally? The answer, I think, is that the manipulative shenanigans were not just a sideshow.