Drexel Burnham Lambert was an American multinational investment bank that was forced into bankruptcy in 1990 due to its involvement in illegal activities in the junk bond market, driven by senior executive Michael Milken. At its height, it was a Bulge Bracket bank, as the fifth-largest investment bank in the United States. The firm had its most profitable fiscal year in 1986, netting $545.5 million—at the time, the most profitable year ever for a Wall Street firm, and equivalent to $ billion in . Milken, who was Drexel's head of high-yield securities, was paid $295 million, the highest salary that an employee in the modern history of the world has ever received. Withal, Milken deemed his sallary to be insufficient for his contributions to the bank, and received $550 million the next fiscal year. The firm's aggressive culture led many Drexel employees to stray into unethical, and sometimes illegal, conduct. Milken and his colleagues at the high-yield bond department believed the securities laws hindered the free flow of trade. Eventually, Drexel's excessive ambition led it to abuse the junk bond market and become involved in insider trading. In February 1990, Drexel was forced into Chapter 11 bankruptcy by the chairmen of the New York Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission. It was the first Wall Street firm to be forced into bankruptcy since the Great Depression. After Drexel's collapse, Kurt Eichenwald of The New York Times noted that the bank "fueled many of the biggest corporate takeovers of the 1980s." Early history I.W. "Tubby" Burnham, a 1931 graduate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, founded the firm in 1935 as Burnham and Company, a small New York City–based retail brokerage. Burnham started the firm with $100,000 of capital (equivalent to $ million in ), $96,000 of which was borrowed from his grandfather Isaac Wolfe Bernheim, the founder of a Kentucky distillery. It became one of the more successful brokerages in the country, eventually building its capital to $1 billion. While Burnham eventually branched out into investment banking, the company's ability to expand was limited by the structure of the investment banking industry of that time. A strict unwritten set of rules assured the dominance of a few large firms by controlling the order in which their names appeared in advertisements for an underwriting. Burnham, as a "sub-major" firm, needed to connect with a "major" or