The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

tie.” As we had arranged to meet for a private breakfast, I had decided to leave my tie at home. Before I could come up with a clever riposte, Rich’s CEO appeared—bare-necked like me. We sat down to a breakfast of scrambled eggs with black truffles, smoked salmon and horse radish, ripe papaya, and freshly squeezed orange juice.
    After breakfast Rich gave me a tour of his estate. We strolled in silence through the gardens. The fig trees, vines, and rosebushes were covered in a thin layer of snow. He then led me to a monumental iron sculpture by the Spanish artist Eduardo Chillida. Lake Lucerne sparkled in the pale light of the sun fighting its way through the clouds. It seemed to be the perfect atmosphere for some fundamental questions. “With the benefit of hindsight, what would you have done differently over the course of your life?” I asked Rich, who turned up the collar of his coat to protect himself from the snow. “Do you have any regrets in particular?” He did not take long to answer my question. “I guess I’d have been more careful to avoid the trouble I had in America,” he said. “I didn’t need that business. It wasn’t necessary at all. I had already made very good business at that time.”
    If it had not been for that business—a business deal whose legitimacy or illegality has never been determined in court—Marc Rich would certainly never have been painted as the “biggest devil.” If it had not been for the (economically counterproductive) price controls imposed by President Richard Nixon, Rich would never have acquired a reputation as “the biggest tax evader in U.S. history.” Instead, Rich would still be known today as the “genius in the formerly European dominated metals market,” as he was once regarded. 1 Had it not been for Rich’s fall from grace, people would speak of him today as the American hero whobroke Big Oil’s cartel and invented the spot market for the trade in crude oil. He would be described as the embodiment of the American dream, the poor immigrant who would later become a billionaire and a generous philanthropist. For it is the American virtues, the American values, and, yes, the American vices Rich embodies that made him the King of Oil. Work harder. Concentrate on your goal. Think big and bold. Be aggressive. Be successful.
    Of course, one can criticize Rich for supplying South Africa’s apartheid regime with oil. One can criticize Rich for trading with dictators of every stripe—from Cuba’s Fidel Castro to Nigeria’s Sani Abacha and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini—and, of course, one can criticize him for breaking embargos while putting profit above morality. It would be easy to criticize Rich for all of these business dealings were the ways of the world as simple as black and white. The reality, however, is much more complicated than that. Life does not always play out according to preconceived notions; life isn’t always what it seems.
    A trader who had dealt in virtually every metal for Marc Rich illustrated this point to me quite clearly. I was speaking to him about commodities trading in a bar in a wintry midtown Manhattan. “Ethics.” He laughed. Then he pointed at my Diet Coke. “Your Coke can is made of aluminum. The bauxite that is needed to make it probably comes from Guinea-Conakry. A terrible dictatorship, believe me,” he said. “The oil that is used to heat this room probably comes from Saudi Arabia. These good friends of the USA hack the hands off of thieves just like in the Middle Ages. Your cell phone? Without coltan there wouldn’t be any cell phones. Let’s not pretend. Coltan was used to finance the civil war in the Congo.” He paused for his words to take effect. “Now, you tell me,” he said and pointed his finger at me. “What’s the alternative? No trade? Without raw materials the economy would collapse. The world would stand still. Do the people who criticize our work want to know any of this? Or would they rather just pick on us so that they can feel better about themselves?”
    These are questions for which only ideologues have an easy answer. Everyone else, the commodities traders most of all, of course, make dowith some middle way between a sense of reality and self-deception. Sometimes they look reality in the eye, but sometimes they would rather forget about it. They live in a gray area—sometimes dark, sometimes light. Sometimes it is fair, and sometimes it is exploitative. The name for this gray