Dennis Levine

Levine said that after his arrest, he seriously considered fighting the charges, claiming that the government circumvented Bahamian law in order to obtain most of the evidence against him. However, he said, the possibility of additional charges in a superseding indictment—possibly including the powerful Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act — and concern about the effects on his family - led him to conclude that this was a battle he could not win.

In 1991, Levine wrote the book Inside Out—an Insiders Account of Wall Street. He accepted full responsibility for his actions and claimed that the vast majority of professionals on Wall Street followed the rules. In his lectures to students since then, he acknowledges his mistakes, stresses the importance of ethical standards to young professionals through his real-life experiences and has heightened awareness for ethical education programs at universities.

On June 5, 1986, Levine pleaded guilty to securities fraud, tax evasion and perjury. Like all of the defendants charged, he agreed to co-operate with the government investigation and exposed the other members of his insider trading ring. Levine also settled the SEC's charges, agreeing to disgorge $11.5 million—at the time, the largest such penalty in SEC history. He also agreed to a lifetime ban from the securities industry. Levine also agreed to pay $2 million in back taxes out of the amount he disgorged to the SEC.

In May 1985, Merrill Lynch detected suspicious activity in that and two other brokers' personal trading accounts. An internal investigation led to Bank Leu. Unable to pierce the veil of secrecy, Merrill Lynch forwarded the affair to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Bank officials suggested that Levine come up with reasons to justify the trades. However, they also forged or destroyed many documents related to Levine's activity — thus opening themselves to charges of obstruction of justice. Their story fell apart when the noted attorney Harvey Pitt, whom the bank had retained, noticed a huge gap between the actual statements of the bank's managed accounts and the omnibus records. At that point, the bank decided to co-operate with the SEC.

Levine spent most of his career as a specialist in mergers and acquisitions. He participated in many transactions throughout his career, three of which were among the more notable hostile takeovers of the 1980s — James Goldsmith's takeover of Crown Zellerbach, Costal Corporation's takeover of American Natural Resources, and Ron Perelman's takeover of Revlon.

Over the years, Levine built a network of professionals at various Wall Street firms who engaged in insider trading. Participants exchanged and traded on inside information that they obtained through their work. Levine placed his trades through an account maintained under an assumed name at Bahamian subsidiaries of Swiss banks, using pay phones to prevent his calls from being traced. After briefly doing business with Pictet & Cie, he moved his business to Bank Leu in May 1980, eventually earning $10.6 million in illegal profits. Levine believed he was safe from detection. Like most Swiss banks, Bank Leu had a long tradition of secrecy. Also, the Bahamas had some of the strictest bank secrecy laws in the world; they forbade banks from disclosing any information about a customer's banking relationship to a third party.

After being hired away from his career at Citibank in 1978, he joined Smith Barney's corporate finance department and worked in its Paris office specializing in mergers and acquisitions. He moved to Lehman Brothers in 1981. Shortly after Lehman was bought by American Express in 1985, Levine moved to Drexel as a managing director.

Levine grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in Bayside in eastern Queens. He graduated from CUNY's Baruch College, obtaining an MBA from the same college in 1976.

Dennis B. Levine (born August 5, 1952) is a strategic and financial corporate advisor. He was an investment banker and managing director at the Wall Street investment banking firm Drexel Burnham Lambert where he was a major player in the merger and acquisition business in the 1980s. His career on Wall Street came to an end when he was charged with insider trading, making him one of the first of several high-profile defendants charged by U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani in the criminal Wall Street insider trading scandals of the mid-1980s. As a result of a plea bargain, Levine pleaded guilty to insider trading and related charges, served two years in prison and made full restitution of his trading profits.