Empires Of New York

new york city: By the end of the 1970s, it was a city on its knees,

In a country that was losing its mind.

it's a war out on the street.

The american dream had become a nightmare,

And no place felt as rotten and as hopeless as new york.

they're gonna make a ghost town out of the city of new york.

it was a war zone, without tanks and planes and people dropping bombs.

But, suddenly...

happy new year!

...At the dawn of a new decade...

it felt like really good sex.

...There was something else in the air: Opportunity.

boom times.

It was everywhere in the 80s, and five new yorkers pounced.

ivan boesky, wall street's biggest independent speculator,

And according to forbes, one of the richest men in this country.

One of the great things about this nation is that we can seek profit.

leona helmsley, the emblem of the helmsley hotel empire.

I'm a dangerous character. Watch out, everybody.

trump, it's taking on new meaning; tycoon, billionaire, maverick.

the concept of what I'm trying to do,

In terms of real estate, is the best.

john gotti, alias the godfather, the boss.

you guys .

giuliani has sewn himself into the fabric of this city.

this is a terrible, terrible emergency.

They broke rule, flaunted their wealth...

42 million.

...Bulldozed anyone in their way...

Hey, tell me about it.

...And we worshiped them for it.

he's a murderer. He's not a folk hero.

By the end of the decade, they had reshaped the city in their own image...

Look at this. I mean, wouldn't you want your daughter to bring this guy home?

...And at what cost?

a tipster had information that would clearly prove

That they were defrauding the united states government.

he agreed to act as an undercover agent.

it's really a shocking turn of events.

You know it's all gonna come to a crashing halt.

Pick your poison.

It might be money, it might be sex, it might be drugs.

he said, "I wish you could see her naked."

Even today, it makes me uncomfortable.

if you think I just slandered you, sue me.

These five titans would change the meaning of the american dream,

And help define the way we live now.

The city,

Our country,

The world,

Good evening, and welcome to nbc news's coverage of the 1980 presidential election.

Our team of correspondents, analysts, pollsters, and commentators

Is assembled here in new york and around the country

To see if jimmy carter can win re-election,

Or if ronald reagan will be going to the oval office

- are you better off than you were four years ago? - No.

it is a crisis of confidence.

jimmy carter was a perfect fit for the 1970s:

A misfire of a president for a misfire of a decade.

It's a decade of inflation, of vietnam, of watergate...

I shall resign the presidency, effective at noon tomorrow.

...A decade where americans are starting to wonder whether the american dream is over.

It's a decade where, all of a sudden,

The greatest city in the world, new york city, might go bankrupt.

the city of dreams is becoming a nightmare.

$13 billion in debt and teetering on bankruptcy.

New york is hanging by a thread, and only seems to be getting worse.

19,000 municipal workers

Lost their jobs today, because of budget cuts.

a whole block would be covered with garbage bags,

That would sit there for weeks

And stink up the place, and this was normal.

about 5,000 policeman, also, were laid off.

This is comparable to laying off soldiers during a war.

four people are murdered here every day.

There's a violent crime every four minutes

"it's just like a jungle sometimes.

It makes me wonder how I keep from going under," was the vibe of everybody.

some people once called new york "fun city."

Now, police and firemen unions in new york are calling it "fear city."

new york city becomes the center and the symbol of america's decline.

new york was finished.

But, in the midst of chaos lies opportunity.

And some savvy new yorkers were ready to make their move in 1980,

When an unlikely candidate shocked the world.

reagan is our projected winner.

Ronald wilson reagan of california: A sports announcer, a film actor

This man, who's dismissed. Ronald reagan? He's a joke.

Ronald reagan? He's an actor. Ronald reagan? He's an imbecile.

I don't think anyone anticipated

That it eventually would become a floodgate,

Of one kind or another, where the votes would just flood in for ronald reagan.

but ronald reagan understood that hope is a drug,

And he sold this story of america on the way back.

this country needs a new administration,

Where there will be new dedication to the dream of america:

An administration that will give that dream new life, and make america great again.

reagan comes in in 1980, and he believes in capitalism.

He believes that we have to lower taxes for the wealthy,

Because that will trickle down to everyone else.

And we have to deregulate businesses, so business would be freer to create jobs.

I would like to have a crusade today,

To take government off the backs of the great people of this country.

all of a sudden, reagan shows up on the doorstep and says,

"no, no, no. We're deregulating everything." one of the first things he does is he says,

"look at this case. There's an anti-trust case against ibm."

He said, "it's over." the justin department ended the case.

The message was: Game on; everything is for sale.

Ronald reagan opens this spigot. Ronald reagan starts getting the money flowing again.

It brings back a confidence to wall street. It brings back a confidence to the stock market.

It brings back a confidence to the american investor. And, in fact, changes all of them.

It enabled the rise of this much more aggressive,

Much more hostile, much more money-oriented culture.

so, as animal spirits are filling the air everywhere,

This new class of investor arrives on the scene, to become a takeover artist.

Using debt from wall street, they're gonna go buy companies

That never would have been takeover bait before.

takeover mania in america. Huge corporations are gobbling one another,

At a rate unmatched in history.

this was the era of mergers and acquisitions,

And they were being celebrated as heroes.

Wall street becomes a symbol of the new gilded age,

And the best symbol of that...

...Is ivan boesky.

A man who came from nothing, and reinvented himself on wall street.

He was a master of secrets,

With an aggressiveness the financial world had never seen before.

And he had nowhere to go, but up.

ivan boesky was this great white shark, out there in the ocean.

You knew he was out there. Every now and then, he would attack.

Very few of us had any real sense of ivan boesky as a person,

But the picture that emerged was this kind of classic,

Archetypal thing of this spectral, gaunt, white haired guy,

Always in black.

He was just this ghost.

Ivan boesky was a trader, who is known as an arbitrager.

"what is an arbitrager?" you ask.

It is a person, such as boesky, who buys up stock

And takes a big gamble that prices will rise,

So that he can sell the stock at a higher price. Of course, if no takeover occurs,

An arbitrager like boesky could end up losing a bundle.

His specialty in life was betting on deals,

When one company was buying another company, whether the deal would close.

arbs trafficked in information:

What was going on? Who was in play? Who was gonna be attacked next?

everybody's calling each other on the phone, trying to get that little morsel.

What is that one little thing, that's gonna give them an edge?

And so, boesky had this reputation for literally living on the telephone,

All day and night, and literally like this, all day long.

Pacing in front of monitors, barking at his traders

if we have that shot, we'd like to again.

Screaming at just about anybody who would move,

And if it didn't work out for him, he was throwing things.

I was in boesky's office once. He was shouting at his traders,

And he would say, "act one, scene one." he said that to me, like he was play-acting.

He did a lot of play-acting. His employees would do anything, however,

Because he made a heck of a lot of money, and they thought he was a magician.

Almost anything that you can think

Of the michael douglas character in the movie wall street...

you keep on buying. Dilute the son of a bitch.

...A lot of that was based on boesky,

And not just his famous "greed is good" speech, which came from boesky

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.

Ivan boesky is, in some ways, kind of a great gatsby character, right?

This self-made person, very much invented.

he was a classic outsider.

Ivan boesky was deeply insecure. He didn't do well in school.

He didn't go to harvard law school. That was certain.

ivan boesky didn't really wanna tell the truth about where he'd come from,

And so he often made these hints of mysterious things in his background.

Maybe he'd gone to harvard. Well, no, he actually bought his way into the harvard club.

Maybe he'd been with the cia in iran. No, he was just visiting a friend's family.

But all that's much better to say than, "I came to new york

'cause I needed a job, after bankrupting my family's strip joint."

Ivan was the son of russian immigrants.

From an early age, he had his eyes to the sky,

And one of the things he did was he married well.

Seema silberstein came from a very wealthy real estate family.

They owned the beverley hills hotel. And so, he gets a lot more money

A lot more capital, and they allowed ivan to move up the social ladder.

ivan had a friend who was in risk arbitrage, and the guy was doing very well,

So he went home to seema and he said,

"seema, this sounds like the thing for me." so, ivan went to wall street.

one of the ironies of the boesky story

Is that, at his first job, he lost money.

He got fired. He tried to get other jobs. He couldn't get a job anywhere.

Thanks, in part, to his wife's family money, who bankrolled a new operation,

He started his own arbitrage firm.

Ivan boesky quickly became one of the best known risk arbitragers.

when you look at his career, early on, some big wins.

Ivan has rebounded.

It's a type of reinvention that, there are very few places in america you can achieve.

It's often a field that's described in gambling terms:

A roll of the dice, high stakes, speculators. Are you a gambler?

Part of the magic of wall street in the 1980s was this almost lottery-like element.

I really think it's a highly conservative activity, that is often misunderstood.

I don't feel like I'm a gambler and I hope you don't think I look like one.

No, but I'll bet you have nerves of steel.

Well, I can't say that,

Except that one has to be able to withstand a certain amount of pressure.