Ep 151: The Myth of Michael Milken with Richard Sandler

**Richard Sandler** (0:00)
The same lies keep getting repeated. I lived it, I was there. That's why I called the myth of Michael Milken. Drexel was a cop, a research firm. They started financing companies that could never get financing before. Ted Turner, Steve Wynn, the market grew tremendously.

**Joe Lonsdale** (0:18)
Why did they want to take down Michael Milken?

**Richard Sandler** (0:20)
They were a disruptor. A lot of people don't like Elon Musk, because he's a disruptor.

**Joe Lonsdale** (0:24)
Did that put a target on his back?

**Richard Sandler** (0:25)
The government has tremendous power. What happened to Mike, it happened to you. It happened to me. It happened to anyone.

**Joe Lonsdale** (0:39)
Michael Milken is one of the great Americans alive today. He's pushed forward medicine, finance, education in so many ways with billions of dollars and has inspired so many of the great leaders now who run our society. Mike Milken was attacked in the 1980s and taken down, forced to leave Drexel, put in jail for 22 months by up and coming prosecutors. Richard Sandler had grown up with him, was his friend and was one of his key defense lawyers. His new book, Witness to a Prosecution goes back, looks at what happened and teaches us about the danger of the power of government to convict innocent people, to ruin people's lives, even if they're doing nothing wrong. Michael Milken was pardoned in 2020 by President Trump. And today, Richard's going back and teaching us about the dangers of this government power that could affect many of us as well if we're not aware of it. And he's going to give you the truth about who Michael Milken really is and set the record straight. Richard, you're a partner at the law firm of Maron & Sandler. You're also an author of Witness to a Prosecution, the Myth of Michael Milken, and you're an Executive Vice President and Trustee of the Milken Family Foundation. So I'm really excited to do this. You know, I've been a big fan of Michael Milken for a long time. I think a lot of people don't realize, not only did he create a whole mass of industry with Drexel, but I think just a lot of my mentors, a lot of people I've really been impressed by, who run a lot of global finance, who built a lot of this stuff over the last 40 years in the US., a lot of them used to work for Michael. And it's amazing to me that he's like a legend who's still around because so many other legends were like the little kids who worked for him, who I've learned from over the years.
And I've learned a lot from him in the world of philanthropy and so much else and he's worked on curing so many diseases. So he's someone that I really look up to. Obviously, there was a prosecution that was a very famous prosecution of his. Before we dive into the book about this, tell us about your background. When did you first meet Michael and Lowell Milken?

**Richard Sandler** (2:23)
Hi, it goes back a long, long way Joe. I met Lowell and I are the same age when we met in the first grade at public school at Hesbury Street School in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. Mike is about two years older than I am, so he was the older brother. In those days, two years was at least a generation, if not two, right?
We've had the triplets of blessing, quite frankly, of going all the way through school together. We went to public school. Well, our parents never moved, so we were in the same class all the way through high school. We went to college together at Berkeley.
Michael was there. We were all in a fraternity together. Lowell and I went to law school together at UCLA Law School. Wow. And we're now working together. So it's been quite a relationship that has just gotten stronger over the years.

**Joe Lonsdale** (3:17)
Amazing. And so you've had a successful career in law, and you're also now on the Milken Family Foundation. I think in the past, you were the chairman of the Board of the Jewish Federation of the United States of America, Los Angeles, and also the US. Federation of North America. Tell us a little bit about your career.

**Richard Sandler** (3:30)
Out of law school, I went to work for my father, actually. He had a very good law firm, always wanted at least one of his children to come there. I was at Lunt. We worked together for 10 years. He was an outstanding lawyer. I would say a lot of what I've accomplished in life just because of the values I learned from him and he had instilled in me and also having worked with him and seeing how he operated for those 10 years.