[Milken:] Does anyone like hamburgers? Does anyone like cheese?
[Beverly Schuch, Host:] Michael Milken's day to day life now revolves around health, his own and that of others. He has hired Beth Ginsberg as chef and food guru and given her a difficult task, to make junk food tasty and healthy.
[Milken:] So, Beth, what are we going to go to work on here?
[Beth Ginsberg, Co-author, "the Taste For Living Cookbook":] We're going to make brownies today.
[Schuch:] After eating nothing but steamed vegetables for two years, Milken realized a couple of things. One, that he hated steamed vegetables. Thanks to Beth Ginsberg, his joy of life was restored by her invention of healthy junk food.
[Milken:] It's good. OK, what do you think?
[Unidentified Child:] Can we lick the bowl?
[Milken:] OK, can we lick the bowl? All right.
[Schuch:] Secondly and most important, he was still alive despite the doctors' dire predictions. So Michael Milken began to preach.
[Milken:] Good to see you. Yeah, I was just talking about diet.
[Schuch:] His cancer fighting organization CaP Cure now sponsors everything from golf tournaments to marches on the capital, all dedicated to increasing research and spending on prostate cancer.
[Milken:] Welcome. Thanks for coming.
[Schuch:] He and Beth Ginsberg have collaborated on a cookbook, hoping to change the ingredients, but not the taste, of classic American food like hot dogs, French fries and pizza.
[Ginsberg:] They believe that a high soy, low fat diet, you know, can help decrease tumor growth. So that's what the base of this book is.
[Schuch:] Perhaps the most significant aspect of CaP Cure is Milken's sponsorship of high level scientific conferences. He is the prime mover and focal point of all the far flung elements of prostate cancer research and funding.
[Milken:] At this conference, we have 10 of the leading pharmaceutical companies in the world, 30 of the leading biotech companies in the world and 250 representatives from the leading universities in the world.
[Schuch:] In 1998, for instance, for the fifth year in a row, he assembled the world's top cancer specialists in Lake Tahoe, Nevada.
[Unidentified Cancer Specialist:] And I guess the take home message from this is that tofu has a lot of benefits but that we need to know more about the food supply.
[Andrew Grove, Chairman, Intel:] I think it is doing an immensely useful job of accelerating and energizing prostate cancer research. Before CaP Cure, prostate cancer was a back waters disease.
[Schuch:] Do you know how much it's going to cost to cure cancer?
[Milken:] I feel it costs $100 billion. If we would invest $100 billion in five years I think we would solve this problem.
[Schuch:] But that's
[Milken:] We've been trickling it out at $2 billion a year last year. It sounds like it's going to take 50 years at that rate. Now, the march, the cancer march which occurred in September 25-26, 1998, 600 cancer organizations coming together, the vice president of the United States kicking off the rally, representing eight million people in America who had cancer and are alive today.
[Schuch:] But you also know that throwing money at a problem does not necessarily solve it. You've got to ferret groups. You're among doctors and scientists who don't communicate with each other. You've got problems that have contributed to it not being solved at this point so...
[Milken:] You've just defined the issues that we had to start addressing in 1993. We have to get the biotech and pharmaceutical companies talking to the university science center scientists. We have to get patients involved in their own treatment. We did a study and found that the average person would spend 10 times as much time shopping for a car as they do talking to the doctor about cancer. The only thing that compared to the amount of time they invested in their cancer treatment was picking a carpet cleaner. We had many outstanding scientists, but in a study of biologists, we found that only 5 percent of our country's leading biologists ever thought about working in cancer. So we had to go recruit 'em. Five years of recruiting has brought thousands of scientists to work on cancer, has moved the ball along in basic cancer research far, far along.
[Schuch:] Milken and his family have donated more than $50 million to the fight against prostate cancer. It's part of a long tradition of philanthropy which began long before he became a household name. Even as a young man, Milken used to tutor inner city kids and he hasn't lost his touch.
[Milken:] But you know how to add, huh? Do you know how to subtract?
[Unidentified Child:] Yes.
[Milken:] OK, let's see here together. Are you ready?
[Schuch:] When PINNACLE returns, from the highest pillars of corporate America to prison, the history of the Milken saga. In the early '80s, Milken and friends were on top of the world. His employer, Drexel Burnham Lambert, was the most profitable brokerage on Wall Street. Almost singlehandedly, Milken built Drexel's huge business in high yield bonds, called junk bonds. Drexel's annual high yield bond conference became known as the predator's ball, a lavish conclave held at places like the Beverly Hills Hotel. Milken proved to be, as some fund managers called him, the greatest bond salesman in history.
[Milken:] The issue of society, politics, what people believe in will determine greatly what the products are and what the success is of companies in the future.
[Schuch:] Selling these bonds previously thought undesirable, he made fortunes for himself, his colleagues and his clients, which include some of the most famous names in American business. Ted Turner, Carl Icon, Ronald Perlman, Craig McCaw and Steve Wynn all used Milken's ingenious, complex financing methods to build their business empires. [on camera]: What did they say to you when they came to you?
[Milken:] Well, they talked to me about their dreams. I had such a fantastic job. During the day we traded securities but by 2:00 in the afternoon, I could listen to people's dreams and ideas. And I used to get a lot of complaints telling me I was crazy, why do you want to go listen to this person with this new idea? But it allowed you to see the future through their eyes.
[Schuch:] All these industries that were created and companies were created by something called colloquially, junk bonds.
[Milken:] They were always legitimate and I think the issue is you call them what you want, but they're the American Dream. They're what's provided us the opportunity to grow.
[Schuch:] You can say that it doesn't bother you that people call you the junk bond king?
[Milken:] They've called me a lot of things in my life and I think names people give you aren't how you label yourself. You know, I have a mission today and my mission is focused on health care and education. I had a mission for really 20 years and that was how are you going to get capital to businesses?
[Schuch:] In 1989, one of the names they called Michael Milken was criminal. The government indicted him on 98 counts of securities laws violations and he plead guilty to six counts. In 1990, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined more than $1 billion. Still, he remained a billionaire while powerhouse Drexel Burnham went bankrupt. Ten years later, Milken has never publicly discussed his guilty plea, but his lingering sense of pride in what he created is apparent.
[Milken:] I think you first have to have a self image and be true to yourself. No matter what happens to you in life, the question is are you true to yourself and your beliefs and have you done what you wanted to do? Life is not fair.
[Schuch:] After serving 22 months in prison, Milken was released, put on probation and permanently barred from the securities industry. He acted as a business consultant until 1996. The SEC continued to scrutinize and investigate his work, asking the court eight times to extend his probation while investigating consulting fees he received for deals involving news corporation MCI, New World Communications and Time Warner Turner Broadcasting. His parole finally ended in March of 1998.
[Milken:] So much of life is sharing it with another person.
[Schuch:] His admirers have said that someone like Michael Milken only comes along once every 500 years. You'll learn where he came from, when PINNACLE returns. As a child, Michael Milken used to help his father, an accountant, do tax returns. Even at 10, meeting his father's clients, he had said he noticed the difference in motivation between people who worked for others and those who owned and operated their own businesses. One of the cardinal rules at Drexel was only back owners who put their own money into the company. Milken says he's still the same now as he was in his childhood, intense, visionary, private and full of new ideas. [on camera]: When did you have your first capitalist experience as a kid?
[Milken:] Well, I was the block captain for the American Cancer Society, raising money for the American Cancer Society.
[Schuch:] Boy, have you come full circle.
[Milken:] So my early experience was non-profit. When I did that, I did not know one person that had cancer. It was, you know, something to do to go to the neighborhood and try to raise dimes for that cause. I grew up in elementary school and polio was the issue. My father had had polio, but he died from cancer.
[Schuch:] Not surprisingly, Milken was a brilliant student in high school and college. He went to Berkeley during the '60s. Instead of becoming a political radical, he says he became a financial revolutionary.
[Milken:] It was really when I came home when I was visiting my parents in August of '65 that my life really had a fundamental change. And on August 11th, 1965, Los Angeles was on fire and the Watts riots began.
[Schuch:] And how did that affect you? You were in a middle class environment.
[Milken:] I had spent a lot of time in South Central, Los Angeles. My father's had clients down there and I used to go when I was a little boy and visit his clients. I participated in speech tournaments, tutoring down at USC and to me, it was like next door. And to see armored personnel carriers on the streets of the city where you grew up, I didn't have to go to some foreign country, they were here in Los Angeles.
[Schuch:] And what was the definitive change from that in your life?
[Milken:] I met a man who burned down a building that he worked in. He had no savings. I couldn't understand what his thought process was. He worked in this building and when he woke up in the morning there would be no job and he had no savings. And he told me he didn't feel part of America, there was no American Dream. He wasn't part of that business. There was no opportunity for him or his children. And in the heat of the evening, it was his way of striking back. I concluded that we never had a democratization of capital, that people actually did get money based on who their parents were or what they looked like, not what their abilities were and I switched to business two weeks later at Berkeley.
[Schuch:] With the intention of?
[Milken:] Providing access to capital. I concluded that there was a number of things going on in the '60s, and I'm a baby boomer. Everything you read about baby boomers, I'm part of that group.
[Schuch:] You were a hippie?
[Milken:] I was a hippie by New York standards, not by Berkeley standards. I was considered pretty straight by Berkeley, but everything is relative in life. And I did have an assignment in 1964. One of my first financing assignments was raising money to get people out of jail at Berkeley.
[Schuch:] Milken went on to get his MBA at Wharton in Philadelphia. He took a job with Drexel in New York when that old white shoe firm was on its last legs. He commuted five hours a day from Philadelphia to Wall Street. He traveled so early in the morning that he had to wear a surgeon's light on his head in order to be able to read the reams of research on the bus. That research became the backbone of his spectacular success on Wall Street. Fund managers said he knew his bonds so well he even knew the name of the chairman's cat.
[Laura Milken:] He still has that same energy that he's always had. He's just doing different things but he's still very active.
[Schuch:] The Watts riots so altered his life that he chose the start date, August 11th, to get married so he'd never forget. He married his childhood sweetheart and they had three children.
[Milken:] I'm just a hopeless romantic. I've always been one. But this book I prepared for my wife for one of her birthdays, and so what we tried to do was get people who knew Laura each year write a letter to her and a note and then captured pictures from that year. This was us at the high school prom, this is a fraternity party at Berkeley, this is on our honeymoon in Hawaii, and this is later when we were on a cruise. So it gives you a chance to look at yourself at different points in your life.
[Schuch:] And so the once and perhaps future master of the universe, Michael Milken, lives like the rest of us, day to day. The difference is, he knows it. TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com