Making Oodles of Boodle

Wall Street has generated plenty of scandal in the past year, but it has been even better at cranking out rewards for canny investors. In its second annual listing of the financial community's biggest moneymakers, the biweekly FinancialWorld heavily underlined that fact. The top ten names on the magazine's list of 100 superstars earned an average of $68.8 million each in 1986, up from $51.1 million in 1985.

At the very top of the list was Michel David-Weill, 54, a senior partner at the Manhattan-based Lazard Freres investment firm. According to FinancialWorld, David-Weill earned an estimated $125 million last year. He had pulled down only an estimated $50 million in 1985. (Lazard Freres disputes the 1986 FinancialWorld figure, arguing that David-Weill earned only somewhere between $65 million and $75 million last year.)

Ranked just below David-Weill on the FinancialWorld roster were such eminences as George Soros, 56, president of Manhattan's Soros Fund Management ($90 million to $100 million); Richard Dennis, 38, a partner in Chicago- based C&D Commodities ($80 million); and Junk Bond King Michael Milken, 40, senior executive vice president of the Drexel Burnham Lambert investment firm (up to $80 million). Not far behind, at $65 million or so, was J. Morton Davis, 58, chairman and president of D.H. Blair, a Manhattan investment bank that specializes in stock offerings for health-care firms.

Sharing equally in their firm's good fortunes this year were three partners of the San Francisco- and Manhattan-based investment firm of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. Masters of the so-called leveraged buyout, Jerome Kohlberg, 62, Henry Kravis, 43, and George Roberts, 44, each earned $50 million. Neck and neck were former Treasury Secretary William Simon, 59, chairman of Wesray Capital in Morristown, N.J., an investment firm, and Raymond Chambers, 44, president of that company. They pulled down an estimated $45 million to $50 million each.

Absent from FinancialWorld's list this year was 1985's top money earner, Arbitrager Ivan Boesky. The man who reportedly made $100 million that year awaits sentencing on charges related to his insider-trading activities.