Levine & Co/The Takeover Game:

...Brooks is severe in his indictment of this orgy of speculative irresponsibility...

...Frantz bares a "facts only" record...

...The obvious defense of his sidekicks was to hide behind the rigorous local bank secrecy laws, designed to attract customers such asi Levine...

...But every post-mortem on the October crash has confirmed the hard evidence that this margin laxity did just that...

...The takeover game, by definition, exploits these opportunities...

...By contrast, Levine, in his finest hour leaving the courthouse, was anxious to make sure his picture was on the cover of Newsweek...

...Money was a trade-off for distinctive power...

...The marriages that can't be kept out of the tale are tawdry, while its villains display meanness that makes them inescapably self-destructive...

...Instead, they consulted Levine, who told them to lie, but also to hire a former general counsel of the SEC to fix the investigation...

...He does not emphasize the leadership they lost along with the capital they dissipated...

...Like the aristocrats of an outgrown society, they chased the money everyone in the game was minting...

...The late, great bull market was only as solid as the takeover game that ran it...

...Hindsight on the October crash leaves no doubt that the suspicious who anticipated it outwitted the pseudo-shrewd who followed Batra's timetable...

...The former SEC general counsel also represented Boesky...

...outdoes vintage LeCarfe as a thriller...

...More than incidentally, all the talk of a new 1929 ignores the specter of another 1933, which brought demand for reform beginning with the regulation of Wall Street...

...Nevertheless, he let his easy money cast him as a character in Wall Street...

...But he does rebuke the 1985 Economic Report of the president for putting the White House seal of approval on the market racket and its antics "as not proper subjects for Federal regulation...

...and the lawyer he told them to hire did exactly what Levine said he would do...

...His first rule before he hit the jackpot was to live within "his legitimate means" in order to avoid attracting attention...

...They deserved each other...

...would break the market a year before its spectacular boom and bust...

...No phony romance here...

...Boesky's personal story is as dull as Boesky himself...

...Even our Japanese mentors, no quick learners, have caught on to the big open secret that the trading mood and the takeover game have injected our investment markets with the financial equivalent of AIDS...

...The commotion over the Batra book distracted attention from more solid works offering better documented analyses of the speculative malaise...

...At the top of Levine's high, after the alarm had been sounded, he provided a bizarre LeCarfe touch of his own by representing his firm on an advisory committee counseling the chairman of the SEC on insider trading...

...When Levine handed Boesky over, this same lawyer made the deal that established Boesky as a celebrity, but revealed that, though bigger than Levine, he was small potatoes too...

...Hence the parade of sellouts by inner circle firms, and the staggering losses they inflicted on their new owners, some corporate, others just stockholders...

...But there's considerably more to the tragedy than Brooks's simplistic effort at a rationale reaches...

...The spice is provided by lawyers psyching themselves, and by bankers in on the action, who act like LEVINE & CO...

...Levine exploited his position with investment firms to make connections with law firms and get advance tips on takeover deals...

...Ivan Boesky is now a great American legend...

...There's no doubt either that, as Brooks shows, the highest-class "name" firms covered for a massive substitution of unsecured debt for accumulated equity...

...So Levine has earned a place in the annals as the squealer who triggered a preview of the crash a year before it struck Wall Street with the revelation that our new era of money-closing in the stock market was just big talk covering up for a big fix...

...Dennis Levine fingered him...

...His profile of the complexities of the takeover game, however, turns on the thesis that Wall Street's once staid and exclusive banking establishment found that productive corporate underwriting had grown unprofitable and, therefore, followed the money trail into the trading game, where the pickings were rich and easy...

...THE TAKEOVER GAME John Brooks Dutton, $19.95, 380 pp...

...This rationale allowed the SEC to leave Boesky better off than it did Levine after it took his car...

...Eliot Janeway bookies on the make...

...I plead guilty to having helped start it with my review of Batra's book in the Sunday New York Times, although I warned that the joy-riders did not have until 1990 to enjoy another fling...

...Moreover, he ignores the official approval of 6-percent margins on financial futures subject to unlimited liability: already responsible for tragedies galore to amateur Baruchs...

...Brooks focuses, on the money the firms started out making...

...The SEC then professed policy concern lest forced sales of Boesky's $2 billion portfolio - petty cash...

...FDR keynoted the crackdown with his promise to "drive the money-changers out of the temple...

...But the SEC had a bigger reason for giving Boesky a sweeter deal, and he did make a bigger show of penitence...

...The power their founding fathers wielded proved too overwhelming for the present generation to conserve...

...With greed goes fear...

...Only a crack investigative reporter could have followed this jungle trail from Wall Street to Nassau, over to Zurich, and back to Washington...

...The consequences for the country's pension funds and endowed institutions are alarming to contemplate - especially because so many of them have been in the game up to their necks...

...Serious readers have been the losers...

...that the banks have been left holding the bag for the borrowings...

...But he is content to suspend judgment on his own body of evidence pointing to the debacle October brought...

...Wall Street's history of irresponsibility is repeating itself...

...And there's no doubt that the operators and the firms they hired split lots of loot...

...Nor does he rate them shortsighted for congratulating themselves on having beaten the game for which they shilled...

...He fixed the case, but for the bank that turned Levine in, not for Levine...

...Every detail that he itemizes is true...

...and that shaky Savings & Loans and needy geriatrics have been stuck with junk bonds (well named, if not well covered) on the eve of a shrinkage in income needed to pay high interest rates...

...He complained about the chiseling, yet tied the Swiss shoe clerks in charge of the branch into his racket...

...Once they shook hands on their deal, Boesky was set up for Levine to turn him in to the Feds when they closed in on him...

...One of Levine's stooges summed it up when he wisecracked that you don't need to be a rocket scientist to make it in the investment banking business...

...He bought a $95,000 Ferrari Tertarossa for one-third down...

...John Brooks, an experienced financial writer, is a serious student of financial sociology, a subject which covers a multitude of sins...

...Their responsibility for the collapse excluded them from participation in that stern regulatory phase of the New Deal...

...Because Brooks leaves the outcome of the takeover game up in the air, he does not consider the clean-up game fated to follow...

...When the volume of his trades grew large enough to attract the attention of the watchdogs at the SEC, they queried Levine's accomplices at the bank...

...Boesky was welshing on $5 million of kickbacks he owed Levine for illegal tips on takeovers...

...In a shrewd footnote, he performs another scholarly public service by needling the academics and their Wall Street clients for mouthing platitudes about market efficiency while cleaning up on opportunities created by market inefficiency...

...Boesky preached that "greed is healthy.'' Levine proved that it can be lethal...

...He easily could have paid cash, but was too greedy to divert all of it from his illicit operation...

...It would have been even more if the Bahamas branch of the dumb and dreary old Swiss private bank he used had not nicked him for $10 charges on each of the collect calls he made from New York phone booths to place his orders...

...BOOKS Nad bulls & sweet intoxication A funny thing hap-pened to the coun- try's bookshops on the eve of the selling panic that hit Wall Street last October...

...As the trading game flared up into the takeover game, it turned out to be trickier and costlier than anticipated, until one after another of the elite names recognized that the stakes were too immense for mere partnerships to handle...

...With the takeover game, moreover, has come an entire switch in prevailing attitudes towards the country's financial markets: from bona fide investment media, where money can work to produce income and accrue appreciation, to a lottery worth playing only to hit the next number the operators make lucky- on someone else's money...

...Levine's is that of a small-time Moriarty magnetized to his own Sherlock Holmes...

...He is explicit in warning of a repeat performance of excesses perpetrated on smaller markets in the days when responsible regulation was an issue, let alone an assumed assurance...

...Brooks is precise in documenting his account of their transactions...

...There's no doubt that the "name" firms sold their prestige for stupendous fees, to front for raids that weakened the country's corporate structure, just when mismanagement was contributing to the adverse shift in marketplace fundamentals now apparent to any harassed condo debtor...

...WALL STREET'S INSIDER TRADING SCANDAL Douglas Frantz Henry Holt, $19.95, 370 pp...

...Instead, he offers assurance that a responsible regulatory regime protects us against margin laxity that invites a repeat performance of the 1929 disaster...

...A common interest bound them together...

...When Levine complained, the formula they found for making the pay-off above board was to become partners...

...They did exactly what Levine told them to do...

...The plot is held together, and justice served, by good guys on the job down the line at the SEC, trying hard and hitting pay dirt...

...No mere yarn-spinner could have contrived its wild plot, proving once again that the truth is stranger than fiction...

...The title, The Great Depression of 1990, explained its meteoric rise to the top of the best-seller list...

...In six years, he parlayed $125,000 into a net profit of $12.6 million, not counting what Boesky owed him for leads...

...Douglas Frantz, now with the Los Angeles Times, has turned a suspense story of white-collar crime into a morality play which, however, climaxes with a tricky upset showing how crime can be made to pay after all, provided it's big enough to be taken legally...

...He made the source of his leaks do so too...

...Solid as it is, Levine & Co...

...The documentation in The Takeover Game is a sober reminder that books are to be valued for the usable history they collect, more than for the timely judgments they offer.e timely judgments they offer...

...Insecurity expressed as flamboyance prompted Levine to ignore the Bahamian laws that would have protected him after he violated the American laws that jeopardized him...