Trading Places

After 13 months of anticipation and delays, Wall Street's most spectacular speculator -- and insider trader -- finally heard his fate. Hands clutched behind his back, Ivan Boesky, 50, listened pensively while U.S. District Court Judge Morris Lasker told a packed courtroom in Manhattan, "Criminal behavior such as Boesky's cannot go unchecked. Its seriousness was too substantial merely to forgive and to forget." With that the judge sentenced the onetime superstar investor to three years in prison for his role in the largest insider-trading scandal in history.

The sentence seemed to split the difference between harshness and leniency. The prison term was one year longer than the sentence given last February to Investment Banker Dennis Levine, who led investigators to Boesky after confessing that he and Boesky had been part of an insider-trading ring. But Boesky, who, as part of a plea bargain, admitted to one count of lying to the Securities and Exchange Commission, could have received a five-year sentence and a $250,000 fine. Clearly the judge knocked time off because Boesky has been cooperating with investigators. Before his crimes were publicly revealed, he taped conversations with conspirators to provide evidence for prosecutors.

Still, a case could be made that Boesky got off lightly. Said Samuel Buffone, who serves on the American Bar Association's white-collar-crime committee: "You can see people convicted of relatively petty crimes being sentenced to about the same time that Mr. Boesky received for crimes involving sums of money many, many times larger." Law-enforcement officials estimate that with good behavior, Boesky will probably wind up serving no more than 20 months.