Ivan F. Boesky, the disgraced 1980s financier who inspired the cutthroat corporate raider Gordon Gekko character of Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street , died in his sleep today at his home in San Diego. He was 87.

His death was announced to The New York Times by his daughter Marianne Boesky.

Even before Michael Douglas’ indelible portrayal of Gekko made “Greed Is Good” a mantra of the Reagan Era, Boesky had already become a Wall Street evangelist of amoral, me-first philosophy. According to The Times , Boesky said in a 1986 commencement speech at the University of California, Berkeley, “Greed is all right, by the way. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.” (Boesky would later say he didn’t recall making the statement.)

By the end of the decade, however, Boesky, once ranked among the richest Americans, would become a prison inmate: Implicated in the insider trading scandals that rocked Wall Street in the mid-’80s, Boesky cooperated with then-U.S. attorney Rudolph Giuliani to snare junk bond king Michael Milken in various felonies. For his own participation in insider trading, Boesky began a 20-month stay in the minimum-security California prison known as Club Fed in 1988. He also paid a $100 million fine.

In Stone’s Wall Street , the Gekko character becomes a mentor to Charlie Sheen’s ambitious junior stockbroker, essentially battling over the young man’s soul with the protege’s ethical, blue-collar dad (played by Sheen’s real-life father Martin Sheen). The film ends with the young stockbroker agreeing to cooperate with a government case against the corrupt Gekko.

In addition to his daughter Marianne, Boesky is survived by wife Ana Boesky, a second daughter, three sons and four grandchildren.

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