>I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me who exactly the
>victims were of Milken's crimes. Not in the moral or figurative sense
>but in the legal sense.
Doug, securities laws are really picky about disclosure of ownership and a whole host of other areas. Milken not only played games around insider trading but helped friends hide ownership stakes to violate disclosure rules in takeovers. You seem to not care the substantive harm that Milken did but want to focus on the actual crimes under the law. That's relatively straightforward since there was a long count of the criminal charges made against Milken under the securities laws. Milken chose not to go to trial and accepted a plea bargain. Here's a quick summary of the charges that led to the indictment from THE AMERICAN PROSPECT
"Ultimately, Milken was the target of a 98-count criminal indictment and a massive civil case filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The charges against him included insider trading, price manipulation, falsifying records, filing false reports, racketeering, and defrauding customers; the heart of the indictment accused Milken of "stock parking," or arranging to swap securities with his accomplice Ivan Boesky to hide their true ownership. In essence, Milken used Boesky as a front to trade stocks in companies in which Drexel had a confidential interest--earning millions for both men. In one representative case, a Milken client named Victor Posner wanted to take over a construction company called the Fischbach Corporation, but had signed an agreement barring him from attempting a take-over unless someone else either tried first or filed a form showing ownership of 10 percent of Fischbach's stock. Milken allegedly instructed Boesky to begin buying Fischbach stock and guaranteed him against any losses he might incur--in short, Milken, Posner, and Boesky conspired to achieve a take-over through fraudulent and deceptive means. The victims were Fischbach's shareholders, and Posner was eventually convicted of fraud in the case. But Milken himself never went to trial on the many charges against him: In return for pleading guilty to six relatively minor securities violations, he was fined $600 million, sentenced to prison for a decade (he served 22 months), and barred from the securities industry for life." Volume 11, Issue 9. March 13, 2000
You may not think the disclosure rules under the securities laws are particularly important but they are the core of the law. Milken violated them and got caught. He went to jail. Some of the other folks you mentioned may have done as much economic damage to working folks but they weren't careless enough to violate the core laws of the SEC and other fraud laws.
It may be true that getting Milken serves as a form of ideological justification for the system, as every prosecution of "bad apples" does, but I shed no tears for Milken as a person. There are literally millions of minor drug crimes that I would pardon long before I would see Milken qualifying for a pardon in the queue.
-- Nathan Newman