July 28, 1986

When: May 12, 1986

The facts: The SEC telephones the head of Drexel Burnham Lambert to inform him that investment banker Dennis Levine, a managing director at Drexel, would be charged with insider trading. Levine turns himself into New York City Attorney General Rudy Giuliani's office that evening. He's quietly booked and eventually leads investigators to Ivan Boesky. The SEC announces on November 14, 1986 that Ivan Boesky not only has agreed to pay the government $100 million to settle civil charges that he traded stocks illegally, pleading guilty to one criminal count, but also will turn state's evidence, providing secretly taped conversations with his Wall Street colleagues. And the dominoes—Michael Milken, Boyd Jeffries, Marty Siegel—begin to fall. On February 12, 1990, Drexel, long the richest and most feared firm on Wall Street, files for bankruptcy.

The greed: Dennis Levine's "biggest insider trade, on the takeover of Nabisco, earned him a profit of $2.69 million. He made even more money for other people. The information he provided Boesky enabled the arbitrageur to earn more than $50 million in trading profits," wrote John Taylor in New York.