(FORTUNE Magazine) – There at the end, in June 1986, even after he'd been arraigned on insider- trading charges and anybody but a moron could have seen it was all over, Dennis Levine was still telling one of his co-conspirators about the pleasures of notoriety. Levine's mug had already been rendered on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, and he was frothing at the news that he had made the cover of Newsweek. (He was mistaken, as it turned out.) ''None of this matters,'' he said, referring to the pending criminal charges, the ensuing public shame, the destruction of his family, the demolition of his career. ''It doesn't matter as long as you're famous.'' From this brief anecdote, contained in James B. Stewart's definitive account of the 1980s insider-trading scandals, Den of Thieves (Simon & Schuster, $25), we learn two things: that Dennis Levine is a moron, which most of us assumed anyway, and that in the end he got what he wanted. Which is unsatisfying news, for whatever it was that Dennis Levine wanted, he deserved its polar opposite, in industrial doses. Simple justice demands nothing less. The same goes for most of the players in Stewart's book. What a bunch of guys! With considerable narrative skill, Stewart introduces them one by one, wisely refusing to linger on any of them lest the reader recoil, and lets the story's natural centripetal force bring them together. Their enduring bond was not so much a hunger for cash as an amoral disregard for how it's acquired, together with an addiction to the adrenal rush that flows from doing something very naughty. Thus haughty Ivan Boesky was inevitably drawn to Martin Siegel, a gifted dealmaker haunted by premonitions of failure and, amazingly, a guilty conscience. Both were alternately drawn to and repelled by Levine, a grasping dolt whose only bent was for cajoling other greasy small fry into criminal schemes of stunning stupidity. Just as inevitably, all were snared at last in the web of the bland genius Michael Milken. Caught, too, to varying degrees, were other fascinating species of Wall Street wildlife: Victor Posner, Ronald Perelman, Carl Icahn, Boone Pickens, each a specialist in getting rich with other people's money. STEWART COVERED the scandals for the Wall Street Journal, where he is now front-page editor. He delivers this collection of oddballs, dirtbags, and greedheads with a sturdy moral sense, always sensitive to the ambiguities of the events he describes. Some of his portraits are remarkably full-blooded. John Mulheren, the Boesky colleague whose securities-manipulation charges were eventually reversed, comes off as almost admirable, even if he did want to kill Boesky -- maybe because he wanted to kill Boesky. On occasion Stewart's sympathy leads him dangerously close to melodrama, but his account, for example, of Levine's fellow inside trader, Robert Wilkis, watching his daughter's piano recital, knowing that he ''was going to ruin her young life,'' is genuinely touching. Stewart is also sufficiently reader-friendly to offer measured portions of the lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous pseudo-pornography that titillated so many of us in the Reagan years. We learn why Siegel couldn't make it on a half-mil a year, and read of Levine's Ferrari Testarossa and Boesky's pink Rolls-Royce. Victor Posner's ''appetite for teenage girls'' is testified to. So is the practice among Drexel Burnham Lambert salesmen of buying breast implants for their female assistants. Stewart knows that great storytelling lies in the details. But you can overdo it. The reporting in Den of Thieves is meticulous and exhaustive, sometimes to the point of overburdening the narrative. Anecdotes often lead nowhere. Some pages are choked with names that few readers will be familiar with. Several transactions are reconstructed with a fastidiousness that only an accountant could love. Other readers will be disappointed that Stewart, while attending to the sordid particulars, fails to engage the larger intellectual questions raised by the takeover craze and its apologists. Was it indeed, as Milken's vast public relations apparat claimed, merely an ingenious response to the ferment and technological acceleration of the postindustrial economy, a means of adapting to oil shocks, deregulation, the collapse of inflation, and the globalization of financial markets? Perhaps Stewart is right to let the question pass, for his purely factual account itself provides the answer, which is: Give us a break! Megalomania plus greed plus lots of dough almost always equals market manipulation, which is simply a clever form of theft. It's also easy to overstate the elegance of Michael Milken's vastly complicated schemes: To a large degree they were the mere flexing of dollar muscle, the brute exertion of financial force. . Of course, when this dawned on Milken's ensnared comrades -- that is, when they got caught -- they started singing like the Vienna Boys Choir. On the day he announced his own bargain with the feds, Boesky tearfully told his staff: ''If my mistakes launch a process of reexamination of the rules and practices of our financial marketplace, then perhaps some good will result.'' It was for just such occasions that the word ''unctuous'' was coined. TURN NOW to the sins of us journalists. In the mansion of literature we make do in a broom closet, tucked away on the third floor in some forgotten wing. The practical consequences of our craving for respect aren't pretty. Some of us take to calling our trade a ''craft.'' And all of us, to varying degrees, are pestered with the lust for hard covers, the yearning to leave behind the yellowing leaves of our old clippings for the thick cloth binding of the book world. The last can sometimes be satisfied on the cheap, by gathering old clips and setting them in a classy typeface between those prestigious cloth covers. Usually this is an honor reserved for senior journalists, but it's a con nonetheless. Collections of journalism not only don't sell; few deserve to. For every A. J. Liebling omnibus or Joseph Mitchell roundup, there are scores of journalism books that read like last year's news, which makes sense since that's what they are. Not so The Money Culture (W.W. Norton, $19.95), a collection of magazine and newspaper articles by Michael Lewis, 30. Lewis is, of course, the author of Liar's Poker, the knowing and often hilarious account of his brief tenure as a trainee and bond salesman at Salomon Brothers. The era that book captured was notable for wet-behind-the-ears investment bankers who shocked the world by pulling down multimillion-dollar bonuses, and a cynic might observe that Lewis, by publishing this collection after only a few years as a professional journalist, is exercising the same grotesque lack of proportion. But the cynic would be wrong -- or rather more wrong than right. The Money Culture is too uneven to be read straight through, but a casual browser will be happy to keep it on his night stand. Lewis makes no apologies for repackaging his journalism between hard covers: ''After all, this is how I make my living these days.'' His insouciance is one of his great charms as a writer, along with a graceful prose style, a mordant wit, and a thorough grounding in the world of finance. All the pieces - in this book touch on that world, most often by studying the zoological types that occupy it. Though the articles appeared in a variety of publications, the title of the book is taken from a recurring column in The New Republic magazine, whose attitude toward capitalism Lewis largely shares: an appreciation for its merits tempered by an amused wariness of the excesses that result when men pursue money for money's sake. The book's deficiencies are common to such collections. Some of the pieces have been, as journalists never like to say, overtaken by events. In a piece from early 1989, Lewis accounts for Boone Pickens's attempt to acquire Koito, a Japanese auto parts manufacturer, by assuming that the old shark wanted to run for governor of Texas in 1990 -- a disaster that Texas was spared. And some pieces are pure op-ed punditry, the form of journalism with the briefest life span. No other section of an old newspaper carries quite the stench of a decaying op-ed page. What's most remarkable about The Money Culture is how many of the pieces hold up, and how well. Few collections of journalism could convey what the lit critters might call enduring human truths -- again, only a Liebling or a Mitchell should try -- but some of Lewis's stories deserve to last. His account of traveling up the Amazon with an investment seminar headed by Louis Rukeyser, the host of PBS's popular TV show Wall Street Week, tells us a great deal about celebrity and the sad insecurity that underlines the quest for the quick kill. The best piece of the lot is ''Eddie the Chop House Boy,'' a bittersweet profile of a mountebank investment counselor who has been hired and fired by (count 'em) 44 Wall Street firms. As Lewis gives him to us, Eddie is likable, loathsome, and pathetic, all at once. This story is journalism of a high order, the sort that propels the best reporters, like Michael Lewis, through the broom closet door and out into, at least, the anteroom of literature.

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EXCERPT: ''Even now it is hard to grasp the magnitude and the scope of the crime that unfolded . . . in the nation's ((stock)) markets . . . It dwarfs any comparable financial crime, from the Great Train Robbery to the stock- manipulation schemes that gave rise to the nation's securities laws in the first place.''