Will I love Den of Thieves?

The publisher at my first newspaper job, the Verona-Cedar Grove (NJ) Times in the early ‘90s, was the wife of a guy who was in Ivan Boesky’s insider-trading circle in the 1980s and was named in this book. I read it for that reason alone back when it came out.

I didn’t know much about Boesky or Michael Milken or any of that Wall Street stuff. I was just interested in my publisher’s husband. But the book was so good, I kept reading. It was so comprehensive and so detailed and so well-written, even without being interested in business (at… show more.

This book – about the 1980s prosecutions by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York – made me want to become a prosecutor. (I eventually was lucky enough to become part of the SDNY myself.)

You’ll see the massive power of federal prosecutors to go after ultra-wealthy corporate criminals; the ride is bumpy, with all manner of in-house drama and courtroom surprises, but the result changed the history of criminal justice in the U.S.