What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence

by Stephen A. Schwarzman

One day in the early 1980s, Boesky had invited me for a drink at the Harvard Club on Forty-Fourth Street. He began by asking me how I liked Lehman. I told him I enjoyed the work and the size of the deals. Then he asked me, “Wouldn’t you like to earn more money?” I said I was earning plenty, and more would come. “But wouldn’t you like to get it a lot sooner?” he said. I thought he was offering me a job, so I told him I was happy where I was. But he kept on with this same weird and ill-defined proposition: “Wouldn’t you like to have more?” Finally, I asked him if he had anything else to discuss. He said no and gave me a lift home. I didn’t think much of it until Boesky was arrested in 1986 based on Levine’s testimony. The Wall Street Journal ran a story about how Boesky had lured another conspirator, Marty Siegel, the head of M&A at Kidder Peabody, with a meeting at the Harvard Club and that same odd language: Wouldn’t you like to have more money sooner? Boesky, Siegel, and Levine, as well as a more junior banker, Ira Sokolow, all went to jail. Though, reading the news, I realized that Levine must have been getting some of his inside information straight from my desk. He must have been coming into my office, taking it, and passing it on to Ivan Boesky. I tell our first-year associates at Blackstone this story as a warning. These men—Boesky, Levine, Sokolow, and Siegel—looked like any of us. They walked, talked, and acted like us. And they went to jail for trading on inside i...

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