[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 87 (Friday, July 1, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: July 1, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
             MICHAEL MILKEN'S FIGHT AGAINST PROSTATE CANCER

  Mr. HATIFIELD. Mr. President, as we continue to debate the issues 
relating to health care reform, I would like to take a moment to insert 
in the Record an article from the June 5 issue of the New York Times 
Magazine regarding Michael Milken's current fight against prostate 
cancer. While I do not know Mr. Milken, I was struck, after reading 
this article, by his choice of turning his personal misfortune into a 
public service crusade.
  Mr. Milken was once a Wall Street wizard who ultimately pled guilty 
to a variety of securities-law violations. He was diagnosed with 
prostate cancer on the very day he was released from prision, after 
serving 22 months. Within 2 months, of his diagnosis, he founded 
CapCURE, a prostate cancer research foundation dedicated to finding a 
cure for this disease through the promotion and support of medical 
research.
  Michael Milken's courageous battle with prostate cancer reminds us 
that disease is indiscriminate. Disease is not a problem of the old or 
the poor, but a tragedy that could strike any one of us at any time. 
This prospect becomes all the more frightening when we are confronted 
with a disease that has no cure, but no disease must remain incurable.
  CapCURE focuses on research for the cure to prostate cancer, because 
it is only through research that we can improve the prognosis of those 
with deadly diseases. With all that medical research can do for us, we 
must do more for medical research. In order to improve the level of 
health care we can provide, as well as to ultimately reduce costs, 
research must be a vital component of any package which is billed as 
comprehensive health care reform. I am pleased to inform my colleagues 
that a proposal advanced by my colleague Senator Harkin and myself is 
gaining momentum and has now been attached, in various forms, to the 
major moving health care reform vehicles in the Senate.
  Our call for a National Fund for Health Research has been endorsed by 
well over 250 advocacy groups and a bipartisan group of cosponsors. 
Together, this informal coalition agrees that only through enhanced 
research can our health care system improve in the areas of prevention 
and cost efficiency, a fact which I ask my colleagues to keep in mind 
throughout the health care debate.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                [From the New York Times, June 5, 1994]

              Fighting a Hostile Takeover: Michael Milken

                           (By Tom Teicholz)

       On March 2, 1993, Michael Milken was supposed to become a 
     free man.
       Once the most powerful player on Wall Street, Milken, whose 
     innovative use of high-yield securities--junk bonds--raised 
     billions for companies like MCI and Turner Broadcasting, has 
     just been released from a Hollywood halfway house, after 
     serving 22 months in prison for securities-law violations. He 
     had pleaded guilty to only 6 felony counts (he had been 
     indicted on 98), none having to do with insider trading or 
     racketeering. Nevertheless, when it was revealed that he 
     earned $550 million in a single year, his image had been 
     cast: he was blamed for all the country's economic woes--
     layoffs, the failure of the S&L's, the national debt. In the 
     end, he paid more than $1 billion in fines and settlements 
     and was banned from the securities industry for life. When 
     his imprisonment ended, seven years after the investigation 
     into his dealings began, it looked as if Milken had survived 
     the worst.
       But on the very day he was released, Milken, then 46, 
     learned he had prostate cancer, a disease estimated to have 
     afflicted 165,000 American men last year, resulting in 35,000 
     deaths. Though Milken looks fit and has no symptoms, the 
     cancer has spread to his lymph nodes, and when that happens 
     there is no consistently effective treatment.
       For a man used to controlling his fate, Milken was 
     devastated by the diagnosis. Still, true to his nature, he 
     refused to let it defeat him. He became determined to 
     mastermind (and finance) a cure. In a matter of days after 
     the diagnosis, he had contacted physicians all over the 
     country. Within weeks he had met with leading researchers, 
     and within two months he had created a foundation, Cap Cure 
     (The Association for the Cure of Cancer of the Prostate), to 
     which the Milken family's foundation has pledged $5 million 
     for each of the next five years. (The foundation has already 
     financed 30 programs at 24 academic centers) All this while 
     performing court-ordered full-time community service, trying 
     to spend more time with his family, writing his memoirs and 
     receiving treatments for a disease that could kill him within 
     a year.
       For this interview, we met several times over the last few 
     months at the offices of Cap Cure and the Milken family 
     foundation in Santa Monica, Calif., and at his home in the 
     San Fernando Valley. Milken was by turns personable and 
     maddening: it was hard not to admire him for what he hopes to 
     accomplish, yet his unapologetic view of his past bordered on 
     the naive, as if he could not understand why the world fails 
     to see him as he sees himself.
       Q: In early 1993, shortly after you were released from 
     prison in Northern California to a Hollywood halfway house, 
     your own internist gave you a complete physical and told you 
     that you were fine. He also checked your prostate and found 
     no cause for concern. But while you were in prison, several 
     friends, including Steve Ross, found out they had prostrate 
     cancer, so you insisted on taking a P.S.A.--prostate-specific 
     antigen--blood test. What happened next?
       A: On the day that I was officially released from the 
     halfway house, I received a call from that same doctor who 
     told me that all my blood tests had come back perfect. But 
     the very last thing he said was: ``Except you have this 
     elevated P.S.A.'' Around 22.
       Q: Which is very elevated.
       A: Right. Within hours, I got a little paperback that says 
     if you have a P.S.A. over 20, the odds that you have prostate 
     cancer are over 90 percent. I immediately started calling 
     close friends who had dealt with prostate cancer. After 
     talking to everyone, I identified Dr. Stuart Holden, here in 
     L.A. at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, as one of the leading 
     urologists in the country. I had a blood test in his office, 
     and the results were confirmed.
       I was a little depressed, but I think a conscious effort 
     that I made, and this might be a link to the previous seven 
     years--it is a link--is that I wanted to do something 
     different. When the investigation began in 1986, I knew I 
     wasn't involved in insider trading, and I didn't take the 
     charges seriously. So this time I decided to take a very 
     aggressive approach.
       Q: What did you do?
       A: I discovered they were having a conference of prostate 
     cancer scientists in Houston. I wanted to attend and see for 
     myself what was going on. I had to get permission to travel 
     out of the state, because I'm on probation.
       Q: And what did you learn at this conference?
       A: The very first slide I saw was this epidemiology study 
     that showed that Alameda County, Calif., has the highest 
     incidence of prostate cancer of any place in the United 
     States.
       Q: Alameda County being next to the location of the prison 
     camp where you were incarcerated. Are you saying your 
     prostate cancer was caused by being in prison?
       A: It might not have helped me. It has also made me wonder 
     whether a study should be conducted of all the men who have 
     been housed there. My guess is not too many of them are 
     getting P.S.A. exams. But I'm going to try to undertake a 
     study of that issue.
       Q: What happened next at the conference?
       A: A few slides later, I saw the curves on life expectancy. 
     And I'm in the one-to-two-year life-expectancy chart. I then 
     had to take a break.
       Q: Did you wonder, why you? Why now?
       A: Well, the story of Job comes to mind. Job was always 
     saying: ``Why me?'' But I had that for seven years.
       Q: Did you feel as if you were being punished?
       A: Well, it's easy to find things in that story that I 
     could identify with. I've had a lot of challenges. And I 
     forget the quote--it may be Martin Luther King. It really 
     stuck with me that the measure of a man is not how far he's 
     traveled, but how high are the hills he's had to climb. So 
     essentially I view prostate cancer as, I just got another 
     mountain.
       Q: After returning from the conference you met with many of 
     the nation's most prominent prostate cancer doctors and 
     scientists. What did you learn from them?
       A: How little money is being spent on prostate cancer and 
     why something takes a decade to accomplish that I believe 
     should take a year. For me 15 seconds was a long time. I had 
     to make decisions--yes, no, buy, sell--based on everything I 
     ever knew. But in medicine, last year for the first time in 
     15 years they introduced a new drug for epilepsy--15 years! I 
     can't wait 15 years for a prostate cancer cure. If people are 
     dying every 15 minutes, forget me. Essentially Cap Cure was 
     born from that trip.
       Q: What course of treatment did you decide upon?
       A: I went on hormones and over several weeks, my P.S.A went 
     from 24 to 0. At the same time I began my Eastern medicine. I 
     began a friendship with Deepak Chopra [the author of 
     ``Ageless Body, Timeless Mind''], and today we are very 
     close.
       Q: And you decided to do visualization and meditation?
       A: I began his meditation process. Then I arranged to go 
     back to Lancaster Maharishi Ayur-Veda Health Center [a 
     facility in Massachusetts where Deepak Chopra was medical 
     director]. I went there with my wife, Lore, and Michael 
     Jackson, who was very concerned about my health. After I 
     returned home I had a doctor from Colorado who was very into 
     Ayurveda Indian herbal medicine come live with me for the 
     next three of four weeks. It involved meditating in the 
     morning and exercising in the evening. I tried to change the 
     way I ate. I have plastered up in my kitchen the proverb that 
     says it's better to eat a stone sitting down that a banana 
     standing up. I rented a house at the beach. I did 
     substantially change my life style for six months between 
     March and September?
       Q: What changed in September:
       A: Well, first my P.S.A. had come down. My lymph nodes had 
     shrunk by 90 percent, and my prostate had shrunk 
     dramatically. So I had responded as well as anyone to this 
     hormonal treatment, far better than anticipated. But tests 
     showed I still had prostate cancer cells.
       I started radiation in November. It's very dehumanizing. In 
     order to hold you in the proper postion during radiation they 
     have to create molds of you. I've got my tushy mold at home. 
     At the hospital sometimes I would be lying face down in an 
     uncomfortable position for an hour and a half. I would then 
     actually meditate on the radiation table.
       Q: How is Cap Cure going about finding a cure for prostate 
     cancer?
       A: Say I'm going to build a factory and have it operational 
     in two years, what do I have to do? What takes the longest? 
     What approvals do I need? I've been focusing on the 
     development of the cure in the same way. The difference 
     between a professional soccer team and young kids is that all 
     the kids run to the ball instead of staying in their 
     positions. We want people in gene therapy to work in gene 
     therapy; people in immunology, there; people in chemotherapy, 
     there.
       Q: Let's talk about your career in finance if we could, and 
     some of what happened to you as a consequence of it. One 
     thing no one will argue about is that although you didn't 
     invent junk bonds, your use of them did create revolution 
     on Wall Street. What do you see as your lasting 
     achievement?
       A: What I accomplished was to change the flow of capital to 
     those people that had ability rather than those people who 
     were born with money or worked for large companies. My 
     ability was to see the relationships of different parts of 
     society and to try to figure out where value lies and how to 
     finance it.
       Q: In the last year have you gained any new understanding 
     of who you were 10 years ago?
       A: I knew who I was 10 years ago and I know who I am now. 
     Consistently, I've always felt the best investor was the 
     social scientist. I was focused on letting people feel they 
     had a chance to participate. And I think I was very 
     successful in doing that. My other feeling was that many of 
     the ills of society will never be taken care of effectively 
     unless people have a job.
       Q: Those are noble sentiments. But many of your clients--
     Ronald Perelman, Saul Steinberg, Asher Edelman, to name but a 
     few--were raiders. Their business--and yours--was hostile 
     takeovers.
       A: You used the word ``raiders.'' What is a raider? Nelson 
     Peltz was defined as a raider. Why? He made a higher offer. 
     If you wanted to go buy a painting at an auction tomorrow and 
     my assistant Katie was willing to make a higher offer, does 
     that make her a raider? G.E. has just made an offer for the 
     Kemper Corporation. Are they raiders?
       Q: But there is a social cost to those decisions--jobs were 
     lost, pensions too. So how can you talk about creating jobs?
       A: You're talking about things that are totally false.
       Q: Well, then correct me.
       A: You're talking about millions of jobs that were created 
     in the last two decades. All the net jobs created by quote, 
     ``junk'' companies. Raiders didn't eliminate jobs in America. 
     What cost jobs were the companies that didn't improve their 
     businesses.
       Q: You feel you've been unjustly portrayed. But what should 
     we say about Michael Milken? Do we say that he was someone 
     who worked at Drexel Burnham Lambert and provided financing 
     for companies? Do we say that he's someone who--
       A: Who went to prison camp?
       Q: Who pleaded guilty?
       A: My view is that you have to take a longer view. Let 
     history be the judge.
       Q: Why did you decide to plead guilty? Your wife, your 
     friends even your brother advised against it.
       A: That's probably too broad a statement. We had a vote in 
     the family and it wasn't 100 percent. The question was, ``How 
     do you get this behind you?'' There were so many 
     misconceptions that I felt I had to find a way to end the 
     situation. Today I feel that was the correct decision.
       Q: As part of your plea bargain, the prosecutors wanted you 
     to make certain admissions of guilt. You told the court that 
     ``certain of our transactions [with arbitrageur Ivan Boesky] 
     involved reciprocal accommodations, some of which violated 
     the law.'' What does that mean?
       A: I engaged in what one would consider a normal business 
     contact, that no one thought was criminal. Since then many 
     firms have signed consent decrees for similar activities, 
     many of them involving far more dollars and more securities. 
     And those consent decrees did not bar anyone from the 
     industry as a penalty. There were no fines. No companies were 
     put out of business.
       Q: But are you saying that these were not crimes?
       A: I've never said that. I said they were wrong. But I 
     don't think anyone knew.
       Q: Let me read you a quote from Robert Sobel's book 
     ``Dangerous Dreamers'': ``What Milken's defenders and critics 
     alike have ignored is that crucial element of motivation. 
     What prompted him to take the chances he did? Why would a 
     person of such talents, imagination and wealth assume such 
     risks?'' And then he quotes from ``Howards End'': ``Why do 
     people who have enough money try to get more money?''
       A: Money had nothing to do with my motivation. I think the 
     issue is passion. Do you have a passion for something? And as 
     I see it, wealth is really a byproduct of creating something 
     of value.
       Q: That brings us to the $550 million question. Why should 
     anyone make that much money in one year, as you did in the 
     mid-80's?
       A: We received a percentage of the profits. In 1986, the 
     profits of my department approached $2 billion. The 
     percentage we received was about two-thirds of what you would 
     have received at other Wall Street firms. Compensation is a 
     byproduct of investing your money.
       Q: Why didn't you take your case seriously?
       A: I knew I had not been involved in insider trading. If 
     Ivan Boesky was involved in insider trading, it wasn't with 
     me. I knew I paid my taxes. I even paid my maid's Social 
     Security--not doing so is against the law--but I haven't seen 
     too many people prosecuted for that.
       Q: What about prison? Were you terrified? Was entering 
     prison your lowest point?
       A: I don't consider it my lowest point at all. Was it 
     frightening? No. I viewed it as, ``How are you going to get 
     this thing behind you?'' Taking out the trash isn't 
     demeaning. Scrubbing the floor isn't demeaning. Making a 
     caricature of me and my ideas and beliefs, that's pretty 
     demeaning. The worst part was the separation from family and 
     from the feeling that I could do something constructive.
       Q: You were banned from the securities industry for life. 
     Do you miss being in your business?
       A: Not at all. By 1986 I was really focused on foreign 
     countries, their debt, real estate. I was very involved in 
     education. I was moving away from being involved in day-to-
     day trading.
       Q: Do people still call to ask you for favors?
       A: It occurred in prison constantly. When I talked to 
     people on the phone, they'd all be asking me for favors. You 
     know, Mike, I'm sorry about what happened to you--but could 
     you get me in this hotel? Or I have this problem, could you 
     give me your advice? Or could you help my daughter or son get 
     a job? That has never stopped, even today.
       Q: You are uniquely positioned to comment on health care--
     as a patient, as a financier, as someone hoping to finance a 
     cure for prostate cancer. What should the Administration do 
     about health care costs?
       A: The 10 largest pharmaceutical companies have lost 
     collectively $60 billion in market value in the last year and 
     a half. People are cutting research and freezing hiring, and 
     the potential for breakthrough research is being limited. But 
     I believe research is the best way to reduce health care 
     costs. In other words, if you could eliminate 10,000 
     surgeries a year at $8,000 a surgery, that's $80 million. If 
     you don't invest in research you're going to have an 
     escalation of health care costs, not a decrease.
       Q: I keep trying to find ways that your recent experience 
     has changed you. Clearly, not wearing the toupee is a sign 
     that you're a different person.
       A: I didn't view it as a cover-up before, and I don't view 
     it as an uncovering today. It became a way of personally 
     attacking me. But being a patient means giving up enormous 
     personal control, dignity, privacy.
       Q: What happens to you now?
       A: I'm at a crossroads. In the two hours that we're talking 
     today, eight men will die of prostate cancer in the United 
     States. Every day, your body produces cancer cells. In the 
     normal person your immune system is effectively dealing with 
     them. So why would a body produce cancer cells that your 
     immune system does not deal with? I remember I gave a talk in 
     the temple when I was 13 or 14, and my theory was that God 
     was within you. There is this inner strength you focus to get 
     your immune system going. My point is that I've got to help 
     myself. Today I'm living with cancer rather than dying of 
     cancer.
       Q: Although people often characterize you as the embodiment 
     of the 80's, you sound very much like a personification of 
     the 60's: you want to change the world. At the same time, you 
     also have the naivete associated with the 60's.
       A: That's the romanticism of growing up in California. The 
     romanticism that what is right will, in the end, turn out to 
     be true; that you can solve any problem and that if you have 
     cancer, it's not a death sentence.
       Q: Even if everything you publish doesn't change people's 
     perceptions, for whatever reasons, can you live with people 
     forever calling Mike Milken the junk-bond king?
       A: I believe the truth comes out. Someday, they're going to 
     invent a time machine and be able to go back and look at the 
     trading desk and see what Mike was actually doing, and what 
     he wasn't doing. But my first goal is to make sure I have a 
     natural course of life.
       Q: And if you only have a year left?
       A: I can't even contemplate that. No matter what happens, 
     I'm just not going to lie down and not put up a fight. 
     Everything else will take care of itself.

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