Michael Milken, dressed in a stylish blue business suit with his hair slicked back Hollywood style, stood on the stage at the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition on Chicago’s South Side, rocking and stomping his feet to the beat of gospel music.
“You see Mike,” said Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rainbow/PUSH’s leader, alerting the audience to the dapper white man. “He’s trying to do the shimmy. Mike didn’t know what feet to shout on.”
Milken, the former junk-bond king who during the 1980s represented wealth and greed, is used to being around movers and shakers. But usually they’re from a different social stratum.
On a recent Saturday, he stood before a mostly African-American audience in a predominantly African-American neighborhood because he now has something in common with many of them: Like him, they are fighting prostate cancer or have family members who have it.
Since Milken, 51, was diagnosed with prostate cancer five years ago, he has been determined to survive the disease, which disproportionately afflicts African-Americans. He established CaP CURE (the Association for the Cure of Cancer of the Prostate), an organization in Santa Monica, Calif., that is awarding millions of dollars to medical experts searching in labs and clinics for a cure.
But Milken also is fighting for something else: the continued resurrection of his public image.
During his heyday in the 1980s, Milken, who lives in Encino, Calif., influenced massive mergers and takeovers as he earned his firm billions of dollars. In 1990, his empire collapsed after he pleaded guilty to six counts of securities fraud. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, fined more than $1 billion and barred from the securities business for life.
Recently federal prosecutors charged that Milken violated the business ban by consulting on several transactions in recent years to financiers such as Rupert Murdoch and Ronald O. Perlman. To avoid jail, Milken reportedly gave up $47 million in fees to settle the Securities and Exchange Commission complaint.
Though he paid the fine, Milken denies he did anything wrong. “The other activity was really a minor activity, and I am not focused on that at all,” Milken said when asked about the recent case.
Most of his business dealings these days, he insisted, are with CaP CURE and his for-profit educational firm, Productivity Point Industries. His efforts include donating about $60 million for research — some of which was given to faculty researchers at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University.
Milken said he met recently in Chicago with national health experts from the American Medical Association, American Public Health Association and local hospitals about establishing a center where Chicagoans with prostate cancer can get world-class treatment. The initiative, he said, will be formally announced sometime next month.
Ultimately, Milken hopes medical experts can come up with a cure that can save his life as well as others’.
It was this search for survival that led Milken to Chicago.
At Rainbow/PUSH, Milken spoke passionately about his battle with prostate cancer and the need for more awareness, increased government funding and shared information and resources among those in the medical field.
Milken called on African-American families where two or more members have been diagnosed with prostate cancer to participate in clinical trials. According to the American Cancer Society, African-Americans have the highest rate of prostate cancer in the world. They are 66 percent more likely to get prostate cancer than white Americans, who have the second-highest rate. Some 180 of every 100,000 black men are afflicted with the disease, compared with some 130 whites, 90 Hispanics and 45 Chinese-Americans.
Moreover, once diagnosed with prostate cancer, African-Americans are more than twice as likely to die of the disease, many within five years.
One reason for the high mortality rate among blacks is that fear causes many men to seek treatment only at a late stage, said Dr. Lawrence S. Ross, head of the urology department at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine.
“A lot of people have old ideas about prostate cancer,” Ross said. “They have the idea the treatment is either intolerable (or) you can’t cure the disease. And that is not true. It is extremely important to educate the community and get men probably by the age of 40 in for routine testing and evaluation.”
For Milken, prostate cancer posed the first problem that he “could not solve in my entire life,” he said. “Understanding why African-Americans have such a high incidence of prostate cancer, and understanding why African-Americans have such a high death rate, might hold all the clues.
“African-Americans can quite possibly help all people in the world.”
Locally, two prominent African-Americans, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and Cook County President John Stroger, have disclosed that they are battling the disease.
But the disease, Milken warned, knows no racial bounds. He cited several prominent white Americans living with prostate cancer, including former Sen. Bob Dole, retired Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, and golfing great Arnold Palmer.
Like many prostate patients, Milken said there were no warning signs. In fact, his doctor told him that he was healthy.
But Milken, who had lost seven members of his family to cancer, including his father, insisted on being tested for cancer, and the blood test called a PSA (prostate-specific antigen) came back with the number 24. In a healthy man, the number is 4 or less.
With his life on the line, Milken said, he was determined not to continue business as usual. He underwent hormonal and radiation therapy and changed his lifestyle and eating habits. He gave up peanut butter, hot dogs and greasy and fatty foods that he had enjoyed since childhood.
His diet now consists of mostly soy and tofu products or foods from Asia. And his beverage is special herbal tea or a drink consisting of soy, lemon and orange rinds. “I essentially eliminated meats,” he said. “Once a week, a little chicken, turkey or fish. But I am 98 percent vegetarian.”
At the Rainbow/PUSH meeting, Jackson urged those in the audience who were suffering from prostate cancer or who had family members touched by the disease to walk to the front of the auditorium for prayer.
“You are what Sly and the Family Stone calls everyday people,” Jackson said as half of the audience huddled in front of the stage. “You, my friend, are on the list. Don’t panic. Let’s fight.
“The sad thing is somebody has got the cancer. The good news is we are going to find a cure. We are not going to wait for Washington to head the fight. The people are going to lead this fight. Freedom comes bottom up, not top down.”
Milken complained that the government has not done enough in the fight against cancer since former President Richard Nixon declared war on all forms of the disease in 1971. Since then, 11 million people have died from it. Prostate cancer claimed an estimated 42,000 lives in 1997, about the same number as breast cancer.
During the past decade, Milken said, the U.S. government spent $2 trillion on defense and $73 billion on the space program, but only $12 billion on cancer research. Only about 2 percent of the cancer research spending was earmarked for prostate cancer studies, he said.
He urged cancer survivors and those who want the government to do more to gather in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 26 for a massive march and rally.
As for himself, Milken said he also has reduced his stress level. At one point, he got rid of his telephones — a major transformation for a man who had more than 200 phones at the peak of his financial career.
He now meditates and has found a new hobby. “I became very interested in landscape architecture,” he said. “When I look at gardening, I find a great deal of joy. I like the beauty of gardening. The creativity. It’s like business.”
