The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

dossier compiled by the U.S. Marshals Service on Marc Rich contains a strange piece of information stating that the Reich family apparently moved directly from the steamship SS
Serpa Pinto
to Manhattan’s exclusive Fifth Avenue. In reality Rich initially lived with his parents at his aunt’s house, the same aunt who had secured their visa. She lived in Crestwood, New York, a neighborhood in Yonkers where there was a substantial Jewish community. They then embarked upon an odyssey that lasted years. The family first moved to Philadelphia before moving on to Kansas City and back to New York, this time to Queens, and finally ending up in Manhattan.
“He Was Small, He Had an Accent, and He Was Jewish”
     
    Marc Rich recalls that he attended twelve different schools in twelve years. This fact made it even more difficult for him, as a refugee and an only child, to find friends. He remained a loner who was left to his owndevices, a force of habit that developed with time into a characteristic. Rich would always be an outsider, someone who neither belonged to the establishment nor wanted to. He was someone with a nothing-gets-me-down attitude who had something to prove. “You cry a little and then you move on,” he replies when asked how he deals with defeat.
    In February 1943 the Reich family changed their name to the more American-sounding Rich—and Marcell was henceforth known as Marc. However, the Riches were still Europeans at home, where they mainly spoke French and German with each other. A year later they moved to 4404 Holly Street in Kansas City, Missouri. They lived in a cramped apartment on the second floor of a brick building situated in a fairly unglamorous neighborhood in the south of the city. The Rich family became American citizens on February 14, 1947. For the first time since fleeing from Galicia, they had a real home.
    The few classmates who remember him in Kansas City recall that Marc Rich was an unobtrusive, quiet boy who participated very little in social activities. The family mainly kept to itself. Marc attended the E. F. Swinney Elementary School, Westport Junior High School, and finally Southwest High School. He took classes in Hebrew in the evenings and on weekends. He appears in the class photo of the 1949–50 Southwest High School yearbook but is not listed as belonging to any clubs or sports teams. One classmate, Elaine Fox, says, “I remember he was small, he was quiet and he had lots of black, wavy hair. I think one of the reasons he was quiet was because he was different. He had an accent and he was Jewish.” 9
    He was the “quietest kid in Camp Osceola,” recalls author Calvin Trillin, who shared a tent with Marc Rich in the Missouri Ozarks in 1949. Rich would later perfect the strategy of keeping a low profile and being discreet. Trillin (who unlike Rich has made it into the school’s Hall of Fame) was impressed that Rich spoke more languages than any other Boy Scout in the camp. Incidentally, the two tentmates did not discuss crude oil prices or arbitrage deals around the campfire. “If a reporter asked me whether Marc Rich ever cornered the market in anycommodities at Osceola . . . , I would know that the only serious commodity at Camp Osceola was something called Chigger Rid, which sometimes stopped the itching of chigger bites, although not usually.” 10
    David Rich ran the Petty Gem Shop, a jewelry store he had opened in 1946. Instead of playing with other children, eleven-year-old Marc hung around and helped out in his father’s shop. “I did everything and anything. I put price tags on the jewelry and helped to clean and sell it.” The wheeling and dealing, the bargaining and selling appealed to him. It was there, in his father’s little shop on East Eleventh Street in Kansas City, that he started to develop an interest in business.
    Business was good; indeed, it was so good that David Rich expanded into wholesale trading and set up Rich Merchandising. He was a typical trader, always full of ideas and always on the lookout for new business. René Trau, Marc Rich’s cousin in Antwerp, recalls when his uncle David came to visit shortly after the war. “He was full of business ideas; import toy cars, export cosmetics, open banks in Bolivia.” He sold precious stones, car parts, burlap bags, and tobacco. Through trading burlap bags he made contacts in South America, especially Bolivia, where the bags were used for packing tin concentrate, potatoes, or sugar. He