Den of Thieves [antikvár]

Prologue Martin A. Siegel hurried through Washington, D.C.'s, National Airport and slipped into a phone booth near the Eastern shutde gates. For years now, phone booths, often at airports, had served as his de facto offices. He complained often about his long hours and frequent absences from his wife and three children, but the truth was that he thrived on his pressure-filled life as one of the country's leading investment bankers. May 12, 1986, had begun much like any other day. He had flown that morning from New York to Washington to visit a major client, Martin Marietta, one of the country's leading defense contractors. A few years earlier, he had helped Marietta fend off a hostile takeover bid from Bendix Corporation, and the deal had launched Siegel's star. He became one of the country's most sought-after takeover strategists. The visit to Marietta had gone smoothly, with only one disturbing note. The company's chairman, Thomas Pownall, was upset about a recent insider-trading case. Pownall was set to testify as a character witness for Paul Thayer, a former deputy secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, who had been charged with insider trading for leaking top-secret information he gleaned while^ a director of Anheuser-Busch to, among