James B. Stewart

Fun, quick, trashy read. The book moves quickly because it focuses on the characters and their interactions, but we lose sight of the larger business and cultural forces at work.

Also, the authors are far too credulous in their approach to Shari Redstone. In my opinion, based on the evidence they provide, she's just as bad as all the other malicious actors trying to exploit Sumner Redstone in his last days. It's just that she ultimately wins out.

The biggest sticking point is that Sumner show more Redstone -- as long as he was cogent -- repeated over and over again that he did not want Shari Redstone to succeed him. But after Shari seizes control in a household coup, she claims (without any public evidence) that her incapacitated father now supports her.

But that's pretty hard to swallow. For example, Frederic Salerno, a member of the Viacom board, was willing to support Shari if he could meet with Sumner and confirm a change of heart. Shari claims that a meeting was offered but refused (p. 170); Salerno claims that he repeatedly requested a meeting but was not permitted one (p. 174). So which is true? Our authors side with Shari, but it's not clear to me at all on what evidence they make that judgment.

Repeatedly our authors paint Shari in a very positive light when any critical thought suggests alternative motivations and judgments:
* p. 167: our authors do not drill down into rumors that Shari potentially promised to pay off the household staff when she staged her coup. ("[an email] from Octaviano asking for financial help for him and his wife to open a laundromat")
* p. 266: "Shari had no intention of trying to force through a merger," when all Shari had done (and would do in the future) was aimed at creating a merger of CBS & Viacom.
* p. 305: "Afterward Shari worried that she'd been too hard on Moonves. Should she send him a text?" -- but she never actually sent the text, so how do the authors know that she thought about it? Shari must have told them in an effort to soften her image.
* p. 340-1: "By most objective measures, Shari was proven right about the merger and her choice of Basksh as chief executive," but on just the next page "[according to] the stock price, the merger had failed to stem the company's decline." So maybe Shari was wrong about her choice, if by the "most important measure" it was a failure?
* p. 343: why wasn't Shari there at her father's death? Listening to him die on speakerphone is not really the touching scene the authors portray it as.

Anyway the book is full of these moments where the emails and text messages quoted seem to directly contract the positive image of Shari that the authors try to spin. Nevertheless an overall fun read. show less

As one might expect, the medical establishment has not been happy with this book. A quick look at Amazon.com reveals more than 70 customer reviews. Those with apparent ties to medicine look askance; those without medical affiliation loved the book although it terrified most readers, including me. Forget traditional vampire and slasher books; this is the real horror Story.

Michael Swango is a charming, debonair, handsome, and intelligent young man. He’s also a psychopath and a very show more convincing liar. He has a sterling academic record, scoring in the top of his class in high school, and at Millikin University, finally graduating summa cum laude from Quincy College. He entered SIU’s relatively new medical school in 1979, and was rather odd even then. His classmates remember him as bizarre, indulging in militaristic and antisocial activities, and he kept mostly to himself. He had been a Marine for a while -- his father had served in Vietnam, but even after his two tours of duty remained distant from his children -- and would often drop to the floor and do hundreds of pushups. No one could understand when he found time to study, but he claimed he never slept, and he seemed to have an obsession with death and traumatic accidents. He commuted miles to Springfield, Illinois where he worked as an ambulance attendant. He even gave his name to a peculiar method of cramming for exams. On Saturdays at SIU, exams were given in assorted modules, and Swango would run out of the room after each one and quickly reread the material the next test was to cover. Soon his classmates referred to this as “Swangoing,” a practice they viewed as close to cheating; in fact when it became more generally popular, the administration finally prohibited it. His behavior during his final rotation concerned many fellow students and he came within one vote of expulsion, but he managed to flummox the faculty and graduated late, moving on to a residency in neurosurgery. There, one of his student colleagues noticed that an unusual number of patients went “code,” or died, following seemingly normal or routine visits for histories and physicals by Swango. It even became something of a joke among the students that if you wanted to get rid of someone, “send them to Swango.” He was unable to graduate with his class because he butchered his obstetrics rotation so badly, but graduate he finally did. He was matched to a residency at Ohio State University, where a highly unusual string of deaths took place.

The nurses -- the relationship between nurses and doctors at OSU was one of master and slave and the nurses were rarely listened to -- were the first to notice weird things, and finally a woman who saw Swango administering an injection to her, whereupon she became almost instantly paralyzed, managed to rattle her bed to get the attention of others and she survived. The investigation that followed is detailed by Stewart, and it’s what I found most disturbing. I can understand how medical schools might not investigate the history of the residents or doctors thoroughly. After all, one tends to be rather trusting, and it’s often difficult not to want to believe what people say, but OSU repeatedly refused to believe the patients’ and nurses’ reports of disturbing events. When the OSU police force and state licensing board later tried to investigate, they were repeatedly stonewalled by a very tight-knit old-boy network. Swango returned to Illinois following his suspension from the OSU program (because of the stonewalling, police were unable to collect evidence related to the deaths) and was hired as an emergency medical technician. He loved working extra hours and regaling everyone with the gory details of traffic accidents and other tragedies. His co-workers noticed that whenever Swango treated any of them to food, he would never eat any, and they became violently ill. They reported their suspicions of attempted poisoning to the police, and Swango was convicted of non fatally attempting to poison his colleagues. A search of his lodgings revealed recipes for poisons, stores of arsenic, and hoards of paralytic agents that were often difficult to trace. Swango served a term in prison, but, after his release, he managed to be matched to a medical residency program in South Dakota. Suspicious deaths again began to occur. This was to be repeated at several locations, Swango always managing to cajole his way into a new position through creative lying and disingenuousness. He eventually wound up in Africa at several missionary hospitals where he was more quickly found out due to a closer working relationship between police and hospital officials.

The FBI had meanwhile begun an investigation, motivated especially by the death of Swango’s wife before he left for Africa, and they arrested him on his return at O’Hare, managing only to charge him with falsification of records on his medical applications. He was due to be released from prison July 15, 2000, and according to an update in a review of Stewart’s book in the New England Journal of Medicine, he may be charged with murder. Stewart estimates that Swango may have been responsible for killing some sixty people. Dr. Richard Ratzan, NEJM’s reviewer, takes a more responsible position in his reaction to the book than most reviewers with medical ties, who are extremely defensive. Dr. Ratzan notes that, in his 13 years on the Connecticut medical examining board, he could not “think of one case brought to us by another physician. It should be the standard of practice to try to segregate any colleague who we think may be likely to hurt an unsuspecting but trusting person who comes to us sick and asking for help.” Unfortunately, as this book shows, failure to responsibly evaluate colleagues can have tragic results. show less

As with all stories about high-flying 80s Wall Street players, Den of Thieves inspired in me that peculiar mix of disgust and envy - disgust for the unethical behavior and blatant criminality that these guys thought they could get away with, and envy for the amazing lifestyles and sheer balls they had. One of the main characters has a resume created for himself with a hilariously straightforward summary: "Dennis describes himself as a person who truly loves to do two things: do deals and show more make money". What happens when that kind of personality is unleashed upon the junk bond market in the Reagan 80s? A lot of money is made for some, a lot of money is lost for others, and a very interesting story of finance, ethics, and the law unfolds.

I was already a fan of Stewart's from Disneywar, his superb history of the Disney Renaissance under Michael Eisner. This earlier work features his same close attention to detail and skill for narrative applied to the inherently complicated world of bond trading and corporate finance instead of the entertainment industry. One of the main reasons that Wall Street criminals are able to get away with so much is that their crimes are grounded in arcane mathematical formulas that most laymen won't bother to put in the time to understand. That's good news for them, because once you get beyond the forbidding barriers of the mechanics of risk-adjusted returns and yield curves, their day-to-day activities are actually fascinating, all the more so because their actions have vast ramifications for the economy as a whole. With the right kinds of deals, they can make or break whole companies, either allowing small companies to become powerful behemoths or destroying smaller businesses with complex debt schemes.

No one understood those debt schemes better than Michael Milken. Even to this day he's a legend for having created basically the entire market for junk bonds by himself, but the more Stewart talks about his maniacal work habits and his overpowering passion for his deals, the more you almost begin to think that his epic paydays (he once made $550 million in the single year of 1987) were deserved. Less worthy were his arbitrageur counterparts Dennis Levine and Marty Siegel, or his partner Ivan Boesky, who ended up inspiring much of the Gordon Gekko character in the movie Wall Street.

For the most part, they come off as barely competent (Levine in particular seems to have been incapable of actually performing any arbitrage, handing off much of the grunt work of making his numbers add up to assistants and making all his money off of insider trading), and while Stewart casts a sympathetic light on Siegel, it's hard to look at what these guys did and not feel more contempt than pity, especially given the utterly stupid things they and their associates did to get caught (pro tip: do not brag about having $5.3 million in off-books transactions to law enforcement officials). Stewart makes their activities as clear as possible, explaining how the seemingly benign sweetheart deals the bankers arranged for each other fit into their larger plans. Movies like Other People's Money could have been directly based on events like their leveraged buyouts of businesses such as Ntional Can Company.

One feature of the book I really appreciated was that it spent a great deal of time discussing the prosecutorial strategies of the SEC and the US attorney's office, then headed by a pre-mayoral Rudy Giuliani. Descriptions of of subpoenas, admissibility of evidence, and immunity agreements might not seem very interesting, but Stewart is good at shining a light on why prosecutions take so long. The difficulty of constructing clear evidence trails, the sheer complexity of the cases, and simple turf wars between enforcement agencies mean that what seem like open-and-shut cases of large-scale theft and fraud can drag on for years; this has obvious implications for the light sentences enjoyed by the malefactors of the 2008 financial crisis. It often seems like the only real crime is failure, so except for the fact that these bad deals meant ruined companies, it's funny and schadenfreude-inspiring to read statistics like the following:

"During the decade ending in 1990, Lipper Analytical Services reported, money invested in the average junk-bond fund grew 145%. That was, in fact, worse than the same amount of money invested in stocks (207%); investment-grade corporate bonds, so often ridiculed by Milken (202%); US treasury bonds (177%); and equal to returns from low-risk money market funds. During the decade's last years, junk bonds returned a negative 11.2%."

Stewart's typically well-sourced and and well-researched profiles ensure that now-obscure companies like Drexel Burnham Lambert are remembered for their crimes; and he's mercifully free of the awed tones of a Michael Lewis, even if he seems almost too willing to make characters like Siegel look good. Some of his reconstructed conversations seem too pat, but that's almost inevitable. However, as a glimpse into the frenetic yet occult world of leveraged buyouts, it's riveting. Seeing these multi-multi-millionaires weep hot tears as they get tagged with multiple felony counts is a true delight and would make the book worth it on that count alone, but Stewart's aims are much higher, and much more valuable. show less

Very early on in the book, Stewart reveals a fascinating bit of trivia about the Disney leadership's corporate culture: every senior executive, no matter if they're the public face of the company or if they're in a behind-the-scenes workhorse position, has to spend a day at a Disney theme park in costume as a character. They do this not as a hazing ritual, but to help the people who run the company understand that for many people, Disney isn't just another media/entertainment company - it's show more the creator of their childhoods. It's one thing to work in the office making deals, planning strategy, and cutting costs; it's quite another to put on a Goofy suit and give a high-five to a 4-year-old who thinks you're the greatest thing that's ever happened to them. The unique nature of Disney products - the word "magical" gets thrown around a lot - means that the stakes around any business decision they make are about as high as it gets in the entertainment world. That's why it's so fascinating to read all the downright un-magical behind-the-scenes material about the tumultuous tenure of superstar CEO Michael Eisner that Stewart unearthed. Rarely will you get see so many men worth hundreds of millions of dollars, each dedicated to the careful curation of childhood, act so childishly themselves.

I was born in 1984, the year that Eisner became CEO of Disney after stints as a highly successful executive at ABC and Paramount. It's a truism that most people consider the pop culture that was produced during their childhoods to be the best (see all of those obnoxious "only 90s kids will get this!" articles), but it's undeniable that when Eisner took over what was then a troubled enterprise, he started a golden age. Along with new President/COO Frank Wells and studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg (an incredibly smart guy who's cruelly referred to as Eisner's "golden retriever"), he oversaw a solid decade of immensely successful, distinctively creative, era-defining classics. The stretch of animated films from The Little Mermaid to The Lion King would be enough to endear Eisner to anyone, to say nothing of live-action films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

But the first half of Eisner's reign at Disney saw immense profits on nearly all fronts and a newly aggressive wave of acquisitions. From animation to live action to television, from Miramax to ABC to Touchstone, Eisner not only rescued Disney from the threat of being bought out by another studio, he transformed it into the premiere studio that it remains to this day. Stewart doesn't use this term in the book, but the Disney Renaissance was one of the more dramatic turnarounds in entertainment history. Many studios have been founded, expanded, reached their apex, and then been acquired or have failed; that Disney didn't suffer that fate is a testament not only to Eisner's team, but his own instincts and judgment.

The bulk of the book is not devoted to Eisner's triumphs, however, but to his travails, above all his difficulties with his executive team. A CEO on the scale that Eisner was - at one point he was by far the highest-paid chief in America - is almost guaranteed to have psychological issues with control, and Stewart's chronicle of Eisner's decision-making processes is as baffling as it is riveting. Eisner seemed to have an uncanny ability to alienate people, especially his closest friends such as Katzenberg, a true creative partner and perhaps more responsible for Disney's turnaround than anyone else, Eisner included. The sections where Eisner costs Disney millions upon millions of dollar in legal fees due to contract disputes with Katzenberg are eye-opening in how petty they are.

But the list of people Eisner alienated doesn't end with Katzenberg, who masterminded many of the best of the Renaissance movies and brokered several of the key partnerships like Pixar before leaving to found Dreamworks after an acrimonious split. Eisner also managed to poison the well with Paramount producer Larry Gordon, who Eisner literally jumped in a lake to avoid after their falling-out; as well as best friend and super-agent Michael Ovitz, whose prodigious talents at dealmaking and client relationships were wasted in a brief and unhappy role as President of Disney after Wells' unfortunate death in a helicopter accident. All of these supremely bright and motivated talents saw themselves frustrated and eventually cut off as Eisner's increasingly imperious and arbitrary rule slowly started to choke off the sources of growth the Renaissance depended on.

Fascinatingly, Eisner himself augured this turn of events in a phone call to Sid Bass, Disney's largest shareholder, before he even became CEO: "Companies like Disney are always founded by creative entrepreneurs but eventually the founder dies or gets pushed out, or moves on to something else. Inevitably the business people take over - the managers - and they focus on preserving the vision that made the company great in the first place. They don't have any creative ideas themselves and they end up surrounding themselves instead with analysts and accountants to try to control the creative people and cut costs. In the process, they discourage change and new initiatives and reinvention. In time, the company begins to ossify and atrophy and die." Eisner's leadership was at its best when he surrounded himself with driven, creative people and allowed them the freedom to run their own parts of the company, and when he allowed others to give him advice.

Unfortunately, the skills to transform a moribund studio into a powerhouse are not necessarily the same as it takes to maintain a powerhouse, and so Eisner eventually began to stumble, such as pushing forward with the incredibly expensive Euro Disney project, and continuing with his increasingly damaging streak of alienating talented executives who disagreed with his decisions. Along the way, Stewart uncovers a lot of interesting business decisions that offer plenty to ponder: the shift from consistent but smaller movies ("singles and doubles", in Eisner's term) to the very star-laden blockbuster system he had initially disdained; the questionable management of relationships between different parts of a studio (ABC in particular); the inability to know when to demand creative control over every facet of a project and when to delegate; failure to properly structure the relationship between board of directors and the management team (Disney had one of the most lickspittle boards imaginable); appalling pay structures for executives and artists; and perhaps most interestingly, poor decisions about the production, marketing, and distribution of content. Check out a partial list of properties Disney either ignored or missed profiting on:
- The Sixth Sense
- CSI
- Survivor
- The Lord of the Rings
- The Apprentice

That's billions of dollars, right there.

Disney is a protean company, as evidenced by its latest resurgence. This book was published in 2005, so many of its loose ends have been resolved by history. Robert Iger is now CEO and has evidently learned much from his somewhat neutered position under Eisner. The "Snow Queen" movie that looked to have a troubled development cycle was eventually released as Frozen, to universal acclaim and dump trucks full of money. Even that looming threat of the Comcast buyout has nearly vanished from memory. The Pixar relationship was mended happily by a merger, to be followed by acquisitions of Marvel and Lucasfilm, which ensures that Disney will maintain its near-monopoly on the notion of childhood for decades to come. One acquisition that could have stood some more investigation was that of ABC, whose ESPN subsidiary becomes more profitable by the minute. Eisner might not be around to enjoy it, but even if his poor decisions once threatened one of the most legendary companies in American culture, it still wouldn't be around today without him. show less