The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

business in Africa,” he notes). It was the age before mass tourism, and flying was an exclusive and extremely expensive activity. Rich loved the travel, the independence, and the adventure. He loved sniffing out business opportunities. It was exactly the kind of lifestyle that Rich had yearned for as a young student. He needed a challenge. In 1964, Ludwig Jesselson, the head of Philipp Brothers, offered Rich, at the age of thirty, the position of Madrid office manager. Rich did not hesitate for a second.
Friends in Fascist Spain
     
    Marc Rich is a reserved, levelheaded man. Like every good trader, he has his emotions tightly under control. He keeps his feelings to himself and does not indulge in excessive enthusiasm. Yet when he speaks of Spain he sounds like a teenager recalling his first sweetheart. It was love at first sight, and Rich finally felt as if he were in his element. He felt an instant attraction to the Spanish way of life, which still influences his own lifestyle. He likes eating lunch in the afternoon and dinner late in the evening. “I liked Spain so much that I became Spanish,” he tells me in his chalet in St. Moritz. “It’s a wonderful country. You have the desert, mountains, green flatlands, the sea all around, music, arts, everything.”
    While he spends much of the winter on the pistes of St. Moritz, in summer he is frequently drawn to his sumptuous property in Marbella. The9.5 million villa was built in Moorish style by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright. The Moroccan coast is visible on clear days. He fell in love with his future wife Denise in Spain, and two of his three daughters would be born there. Denise Rich told me that their happiest times were in Madrid. Spanish is still one of the family’s languages. “When we left Spain I didn’t want my daughters to lose Spanish, so we continued to speak the language,” he told me. He still employs Spanish-speaking domestic staff.
    A painting by the Spanish painter Antonio Quirós (1912–84) hangs in Rich’s Swiss office. He initially saw it in the first apartment he rented in Madrid in 1964, and he liked it so much that he bought it. The apartmentwas in the Torre de Madrid, at the time the tallest building in Europe. The Philipp Brothers offices were in the same building. Rich had chosen the location carefully. It meant that he lost no time traveling to work and could be in the office whenever necessary.
    “We worked very, very hard. Marc’s capacity for work is incredible,” recalls Ursula Santo Domingo. She first met him forty-five years ago, after he had advertised in the newspaper for a secretary. “He invited me to an interview on a Saturday. The whole company was empty. Not a soul was there except Marc Rich. I later found out that he worked every Saturday, and every Sunday, too. He thinks about business twenty-four hours a day.” Fifteen-hour days beginning at 7:00 A.M . and ending at 10:00 P.M . were the rule rather than the exception. As a joke, Rich would greet colleagues who arrived for work at 8.30 A.M . with a casual “Good afternoon.”
    Spain in 1964 was an exciting place to be. The country had been ruled with an iron fist by Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s fascist government since the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. Spain remained politically and economically isolated until 1955 and was even denied membership in the United Nations. The peninsula became strategically important during the cold war thanks to its proximity to the Strait of Gibraltar. The 1960s brought an unexpected economic boom that catapulted Spain from a predominantly rural country to an open, modern industrial society. The “Spanish miracle” was sparked by radical liberal economic reforms and aided by massive public investment in infrastructure, while technocrats supplanted the old fascist Falangists in the government.
    One of these technocrats was Alfredo Santos Blanco, a forty-year-old professor of economics employed at the Ministry of Industry. He became of one Rich’s most important contacts and an excellent opener of doors. “Through my friendship with Alfredo I was able to have many more connections,” Rich tells me. When Rich first met Santos Blanco he was the president of Minas de Almadén y Arrayanes, the state-run cinnabar, or mercury ore, mines Rich had done business with before. Thelargest cinnabar reserves in the world were situated near Almadén, and it had been mined since ancient times for its mercury content. The