Milken Redeemed?

What if 'the good' represents the enormous, unparalleled contributions Milken has made to world healthcare? In point of fact, can doing right ever be wrong, no matter who's doing it?

By Don Menn

The Junk Bond King

Part I of the Milken epic was seen on a worldwide stage: Best known as the "Junk Bond King" and the biggest player in the insider trading scandals of 1980s, Milken was highly influential in fueling the 1980s boom in corporate raids and hostile corporate takeovers. At the height of his Wall Street success, he was regarded as a financial innovator.

OnMarch 29, 1989, Milken was indicted on 98 counts of racketeering and fraud relating to an investigation into insider trading, tax evasion, stock parking (buying stocks for the benefit of another) and other offenses. Milken was accused of using a wide-ranging network of contacts to manipulate stock and bond prices. By the end of his legal ordeal, Milken was considered the epitome of 1980s Wall Street greed.

Milken pled guilty to six securities and reporting felonies in 1990. He was sentenced to ten years in prison, but served only 22 months at the Federal Prison Work Camp in Pleasanton, California. He exited, barred for life from the securities industry and required to pay fines that reached towards ten figures (final tallies vary).

Part II began immediately thereafter: Milken resumed the other significant part of his life's work: philanthropy.

Milken has put his money where it hurts, literally. During the last decade and a half he has contributed, raised, and poured nearly a billion dollars into research that has measurably improved survival odds for countless sufferers of disease. Diseases which a short time ago, when diagnosed, sent sufferers home to climb into the sack and await the hooded spook with the scythe. Milken's billions rushed forth gallantly to slay killers: cancer, diabetes, epilepsy, you name it-through his many philanthropic efforts.

Screamer headlines constantly searched for the mote in the eye of one of our time's consummate salesmen- what can't he sell, who can't he convince? Were the End Times coming, when he'd make medical nonprofits as mad as he's made some vocal public educators? Is Mr. Milken, ever open-of pocket, now (finally?) pure of heart?

Or is it his sad, lingering penalty to ever suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous skeptics who say his medical "philanthropy" will turn out to be all about turning a buck? (Russ Baker in The Nation was especially critical.)

Back to 1993

In a small conference room in Las Vegas' Mirage Hotel, entertainers and titans are gathered. Steve Wynn, the owner of the place, is impeccable in dress and demeanor. Shelly Duvall is taller than you'd think. Quincy Jones is focused-like several others-on the eye-candy at his side, Nastassja Kinski, who is shorter than you'd think, but just as beautiful.

A smiling, baldheaded man enters and the focus of attention- in a room of attention-getters-shifts. "I'm sorry-I've been detained," he apologizes. Everyone in earshot laughs. As he extends his hand he says, "Hi. I'm Mike Milken."

Oh, him.

In October 1993 it was hard not to catch the joke. Milken had just emerged from jail, the highest paid person and the highest profile personality of his time to fall from the tower into the dungeon. He may have left his toupee at the courthouse, but he brought his conscience with him.

The dotcom bubble was just beginning to inflate, and in Las Vegas at the Mirage they are celebrating the launch of 7th Level, an interactive educational CD-ROM for kids.

Heavyweights from the software world abound, but the room, now, is really Milken's, and he works it effortlessly. Topics bounce around, but they keep coming back to education- Milken's new obsession.

Milken scribbles a phone number on a scrap of paper, slides it to the guy next to him, and whispers, "If you hear anything going on, call me-I have a hundred million I want to put into education this year."

And so he did. And many millions more over the next decade and a half-in the form of $25,000 checks to 2,200 outstanding teachers; in the form of "Mike's Math Club" hosting tens of thousands of children in inner-city schools; in the form of college educations for more than 200 "Milken Scholars" with special needs because of immigration status, poverty or worse.

The "Milken Center" has provided computer training to more than 100,000 teen parents, dropouts, ex-offenders, welfare recipients and the economically disadvantaged. All non-profit stuff and all praised to the heights of school bell towers. Praised that is, until Milken and his friend, Oracle founder Larry Ellison created their for profit Knowledge Universe.

Whoops. Now that did not sit so well with some very vocal public educators. They grumbled that something, well, unseemly might be going on. Maybe all this "philanthropy" had been about helping the poor out all right-out of what little they had left.

Knowledge Universe Education was created for families who felt public education had let their kids down, parents wealthy enough to afford the extras Milken's for-profit provided. Yes, it reportedly brings in a billion a year, but that's only 1/6th of one percent of the $600 billion education business. And it begs the question:

Why have20,000 households trusted Milken more than their local school districts? And even as

Knowledge Universe Education grew, Milken continued (and still continues) to fund non-profit education projects (with no strings attached) to the tune of millions and millions of dollars.

Flash Forward to 2007

Not everyone from that crowd at the Mirage Hotel in Vegas is doing so well these days.

The Internet Bubble burst. Time caught up with many of the digital elite, and some are hurting, down to their last billion. And others don't feel so good, literally. Steve Wynn's diabetes wreaks havoc with his vision, probably why he put his elbow through the Picasso portrait, Le Rêve, just before it was to sell for $139 million. Maybe the money he donated to Milken's Diabetes Research will help prevent his losing sight of all he loves-the daughter he saved from kidnappers, the billion-dollar resorts he's built, the art treasures he's collected.

Milken himself famously fights prostate cancer, but denies he ever changed his priorities. In fact, it's an insult to imply his medical philanthropy has been about saving himself or generating self-serving PR. Long before he got sick, he'd been as verifiably committed-as much as virtually any living human in the last century-to saving lives. Not just the lives of his friends and partners, mind you, but the tens of thousands of people touched by disasters on the DNA level, the ones that can kill you.

The record is clear.

In the 1970s, when Milken lost ten family members to cancers ranging from melanoma to breast, he began his mission to find cures. In 1982, long before any criminal indictments, he and his brother made it official when they founded and endowed the Milken Family Foundation with several hundred million dollars to support medical research and education. In 1989, long before Milken, himself, received that nasty, frighteningly high PSA test back that seemed to say, "Light's out," the Milken Family Foundation partnered with the American Epilepsy Society to recognize outstanding physicians and scientists, awarding grants and renewable fellowships up to $50,000 annually to support the research of more than 100 scientists.

So, Milken's medical philanthropy was anything but new. What was new the year of his release from prison was his own cancer (now long in remission) and the Prostrate Cancer Foundation (PCF), which he founded and built into what is now the world's largest philanthropic source of funds for prostate cancer research.

In 1995, Milken organized the first National Cancer Summit. That same year, he organized a conference at the Food and Drug Administration that led directly to legislation, signed by President Clinton, accelerating approval of cancer drugs.

All told (and still counting) Milken has worked to fund prostate cancer research for 14 years, supported research on breast cancer for 35 years, melanoma for 33 years, and many other diseases (including pediatric neurological conditions, AIDS, Alzheimer's, childhood leukemia and Type-1 diabetes) for the better part of three decades.

Since its inception, the Prostate Cancer Foundation has raised more than $260 million to fund more than 1,400 medical research projects at more than 100 institutions worldwide, investing 78 cents of every dollar raised on medical and scientific research (more than three times the average per dollar portion spent by the other major healthcare philanthropies). PCF has become the unrivaled leader in creating and funding advocacy and public awareness campaigns. Those campaigns have helped to increase government funding for prostate cancer research more than 12-fold over the past decade.

Charles Myers, M.D., president of the American Institute for Diseases of the Prostate, says simply, "Mike revolutionized the field." Dominick Dunne wrote in Vanity Fair that one doctor told him Milken's support "had advanced the study of the disease by 40 years." The former director of National Cancer Institute, Samuel Broder, told Forbes, "Milken is probably the single most effective layperson advocate for cancer research."

But Milken has never pretended to do this all alone. Milken reaches out way beyond his own considerable bank balance. He throws out a wide net to pull in marquees full of brand names: Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone just donated $35 million to FasterCures. Sports heroes-not just seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong, but most of the NBA and Major League Baseball players-started wearing blue wrist bands (to go with Armstrong's yellow one) in support of Milken's efforts. Merchants came onboard: Safeway, Giorgio Armani, Hugo Boss, Neiman Marcus, Gillette, even magazines like Fortune and Esquire.

Presidents and contenders (from both sides of the aisle) have smiled for the camera with Milken. Even the guy who put Milken in prison, Rudolph Giuliani, now a candidate himself, found a new friend, after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2000. Fortune reported that Giuliani and Milken spoke by phone soon thereafter and a new friendship was formed. "He knew more than any doctor," Giuliani asserted. "I realize now that I didn't know him then. He took the tremendous talent he had in business and is using it to fight prostate cancer. What more could you ask for?"

Milken continues to beat the drums for money. There he is, making TV appearances; there he goes, testifying before Congress, making speeches wherever it might matter. In addition to his personal contributions, Milken has raised more than a quarter of a billion dollars from the public to support medical research.

As the unrivaled leader in prostate cancer research and advocacy, it is only fair that PCF be credited, at least in part, for a remarkable cancer statistic. In the developed world, prostate cancer is the most common non-skin cancer, and before PCF was founded, prostate cancer deaths had been rising steadily. Since then, The American Cancer Society estimates that while 29,000 U.S. men will die from prostate cancer this year, that statistic represents a 32% reduction in mortality since 1993. Or another way:120,000 men who were predicted to have died are alive in 2008-including Mike Milken.

In 2003, impatient for a paradigm shift in all areas of medicine, Milken launched FasterCures, an "action tank" to accelerate the discovery and development of new treatments and cures for serious diseases. The president is Greg Simon, Chief Domestic Policy Advisor to Vice President Al Gore from 1993 to 1997, and the board includes heavy-hitters from academia and business, including a couple of Nobel Prize winners, a former ambassador to Hungary, and several medical school trustees, deans, presidents and provosts. As its
names suggests, FasterCures attempts to improve medicine quickly.

There seems to be no stopping the man's philanthropic efforts. Milken's innumerable good deeds on behalf of your family's health and my family's health and the health of families worldwide have, if anything, gained momentum year by year. The list goes on and on, and continues to grow.

And yet… And yet… We return to where we started. Since his incarceration, skeptics have maintained that Milken is trying to buy his way into heaven, or at least polish a tarnished reputation. Even if Michael Milken is not trying to redeem himself in the eyes of the world, can his countrymen, jurors in the court of public opinion, ever fully forgive him? Does Shakespeare correctly anticipate Milken's repute in the rear-view mirror of posterity? "The evil that men do lives after them," the poet observed; "the good is oft interred with their bones."